What it takes to help First Nations children thrive at school
Liam Reid and Nicole Kunoth Hampton have lived with their five kids in a two-bedroom apartment for four years.
It’s a squeeze, but like so many families, they make do.
When they moved to Mparntwe Alice Springs from the remote Aboriginal community of Mimili so their children could go to school in town, they hoped their kids would have an experience they never got growing up.
It’s a move that many Aboriginal families like theirs make.
“No preschool for me, I just lived out bush when I was younger,” Ms Kunoth Hampton said.
“And then my first school … that was built out of gum tree and some material to put over for a roof, so that was my first little school.”
As a former teaching assistant, now cultural tourism operator, Arrernte Kaytetye man Mr Reid has seen the transformative power that quality childcare services can bring to a child’s life, and the way it can set them up for a different life trajectory.
But he’s also seen how poverty and entrenched disadvantage can make it harder to get kids to school or preschool, in ways most people can’t imagine.
Severely overcrowded homes, lack of shoes, or even access to day-to-day things like a washing machine can be a barrier.
“Sometimes people can’t send their kids to school because they’ve got no food, or sometimes … they’ve got dirty clothes because they can’t do washing and that because of an unstable home,” Mr Reid told 7.30.
Their youngest, three-year-old Kasey, attends a childcare program run by the community-controlled Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, that hires Aboriginal staff and incorporates culture and language through “two-way” learning, an experience that neither of her parents had as youngsters.
“Every day she is just blowing our minds with something new,” Mr Reid said.
“She’s learning how to speak in language and that’s something I missed out on.”
‘Closing the Gap starts with our children’
Research shows that ages zero to five are crucial for a child’s brain development.
Nationally in 2021, only 34.3 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children commencing school were assessed as being developmentally on track – emotionally, physically and socially — compared to 56.2 per cent of non-Indigenous children.
Under the National Closing the Gap Agreement, governments have committed to having First Nations children on par with the rest of the population by 2031.
“Closing the Gap starts with our children,” said Arrernte and Luritja woman Catherine Liddle, the CEO of the peak body representing First Nations children, SNAICC.
“We’ve always understood that if you look after your children, you have a strong community. If you have strong communities and strong families, then pretty much everyone’s doing OK.”
Ms Liddle said investing in accessible, affordable and culturally safe early education is so important because of the profound impacts on children’s life outcomes down the line.
Getting the early years right impacts the gross rates of Indigenous children going into child protection, into youth justice, and then as adults ending up in jail.
“There is a direct correlation,” she said.
“If you have access to preschool you’re more likely to finish year 12, to have better access to health, jobs, you’re going to have better life trajectories.”
A potentially ‘scary’ experience
On latest count, 16.4 per cent of First Nations children in the Northern Territory were developmentally ready for school, about half that of other states and territories.
But services like Congress are working to change that.
Southern Arrernte and Pitjantatjara woman Samara Swan is the family engagement officer at Congress, where she builds relationships with the community to encourage them to send their kids to preschool.
“For a lot of our kids English is a second language, so going straight into preschool can be quite a scary experience,” Ms Swan said.
“I support them [parents] with filling out enrolment forms, because even walking through the doors of a preschool can be quite scary for family, especially if they’ve been living out bush.”
Ms Swan also works with parents to assess whether their children need a little extra help.
“Doing that screening helps us identify areas of strength … and the areas where we can best support them and then we can refer them on if we need to.”
The centre offers a range of healthcare services to help with things like hearing, speech or learning disabilities.
The Productivity Commission’s Closing the Gap dashboard states that 30 per cent of First Nations kids in their first year of school in the NT were “identified by teachers as requiring further assessment to determine if they have a developmental difficulty that affects their ability to do schoolwork”.
Liam Reid said it’s crucial these services are available when they’re needed.
“We do need more programs that will target these kids with health conditions that are going to affect them later in life,” he said.
Who is responsible?
Ms Liddle said children can’t thrive if the critical infrastructure in the communities isn’t there.
“If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to be able to invest in your children to get them access to health care,” Ms Liddle told 7.30
“But in actual fact those services and systems don’t exist, or they are not able to connect with them in the way they need to.”
Ms Liddle says consistent government funding for early education and children’s health over election cycles has been an issue.
The National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) said that Closing the Gap is a shared responsibility of all tiers of government and First Nations peak representative bodies.
The NIAA said since the Closing the Gap target came in 2020 the agency has invested about $160 million in a range of early childhood development and enabling activities.
“At this moment in time, the biggest investments into early education and care in Australia are not in the Aboriginal community-controlled sector, they’re actually in the mainstream,” Ms Liddle said.
“That is a failure by governments to invest in the right set of criteria into the right type of service delivery, and to move at the speed that it needs to move at.”
Earlier this year, a review by the Productivity Commission of the Closing the Gap Agreement found governments at all levels “do not face timely or appropriate consequences for failure to meet the commitments they made”.
Shadow Minister for Early Education Angie Bell told the ABC blame could not be squarely placed on the former Morrison government, as the gap widened during a “once in a century pandemic” and that “Closing the Gap is a joint initiative”.
Minister for Early Education Anne Aly admitted “more needs to be done” and that “most progress” is being seen “where governments are working in partnership with First Nations organisations and communities”.
How do we know if kids are developmentally ready?
Every three years, right across Australia, all children in their first year of school are assessed on whether they are developmentally ready using something called the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC).
It assesses things like whether a child can count from one to 20, turn the pages of a book, or listen to a teacher. It’s this data that is used to assess whether we’re on track to close the gap in early childhood development.
Over the past decade standards have been improving, but in the last survey in 2021, during the COVID pandemic, levels dropped across the board.
Ms Liddle said it’s important to note the survey is not always “fit for purpose” for Aboriginal communities.
“It misses those unique strengths that Aboriginal children have,” she said.
Ngunnawal woman and Jervis Bay School principal Lana Read explained that when they’re conducting their survey, they involve an Aboriginal education officer from the local community.
Despite work from the AEDC developers to flag cultural bias and make the test “universal”, some academics and educators say the test can still be subjective.
“It’s an individual or a small group of people who are answering the questions about the children, so I guess there is always room for interpretation or perhaps hidden biases to come through,” Ms Read said.
Ms Read said she is proud of her school’s achievements.
“There’s no children who we have seen come out as being developmentally vulnerable, or at risk in two or more areas,” she said.
“And for a community like ours that makes my heart sing.”
But there’s more work to be done to ensure all kids have the same chances of success.
“I think we’ve got a long way to go before every child in Australia walks in at the same level when they come into their early years of learning,” she said.
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