Literacy program fails with Indigenous – A $30 million federal government literacy program twice-extended across some of the country’s most remote schools has failed to boost the literacy of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, with schools instead reporting a significant decline in attendance.
The Flexible Literacy for Remote Primary Schools Program was first funded in 2014 as a three-year trial to improve teacher skills and student literacy across 34 remote schools in the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia, and was extended twice until 2019.
It used Direct Instruction, a controversial teaching method from the US where teachers read from a scripted lesson plan while students respond orally and as a group. The program was based on a system used in Cape York schools, promoted by Aboriginal community leader Noel Pearson.
But research published in The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, which analyzed MySchool data for 25 participating remote schools where more than 80 per cent of students were Indigenous, found the program did not improve reading results despite interim evaluations describing its positive impact.
The study by University of South Australia researchers used grade 3 and 5 NAPLAN reading results as a proxy for literacy as well as school attendance rates, to compare outcomes in remote primary schools with and without the program in the three years before and after it began.
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