Some remote schools in the Northern Territory are receiving funding for less than half of their enrolled students under a controversial model critics say treats First Nations students as a "budget saving" measure.
The "effective enrolment" model — which allocates funding based primarily on attendance rather than enrolment — is the subject of an ongoing review commissioned by the NT government last year.
But official data, released following questions from independent MLA Yingiya Guyula earlier this year, shows the ongoing impact of the model on 15 schools in remote Aboriginal communities across the territory.
Lajamanu school in the Central Desert region, for example, received funding for only 66 of its 173 enrolled students last year.
Maningrida school — servicing one of the largest remote towns in the territory — received funding for just 281 of its 481 enrolled students during the same period.
The funding model — which is not used in any other state or territory — has been operating since 2015, and applies to all public schools, with the exception of special schools for students with disability and distance education.
It accounts for 65 per cent of a school’s overall budget, and is calculated using the average of the previous year’s two highest weeks of attendance for each term.
The Department of Education said the model was intended to allocate limited resources "to where students are enrolled and attending".
But, according to the Australian Education Union, it means out of 34,000 students enrolled in the NT last year, about 7,000 effectively had no funding attached to them.
"This is in direct contravention of the rights of these children to their fundamental right to an education," said the union’s NT president Michelle Ayres, who worked in a remote school in Central Australia until 2021.
"Without a doubt, the majority of those kids are Aboriginal, the majority of those kids come off remote communities, and especially very remote communities."
Model sends schools into a 'downward spiral'
The Northern Territory has the lowest school attendance rates in Australia, according to the latest Productivity Commission data.
It also has the lowest rate of First Nations students attending school, particularly in "very remote" areas where the proportion attending most days dropped to just 14 per cent in 2019.
Daniel Yore — who was named the Northern Territory's Teacher of the Year in 2020 but has since left the sector — said plummeting attendance rates sent schools into a "downward spiral" of funding cuts.
"The schools that are starting to have the drop-off, and kids disengaging, they start losing money," he said.
"And when they start losing money, they cut staff. And when you cut staff, you're less able to re-engage kids."
Ms Ayres said schools then have to try to re-engage students who are not attending from an increasingly limited pool of resources.
"Instead of providing additional funding to re-engage low attending students, the NT government has treated them as a budget saving."
The department told the ABC it had allocated $15.3 million this financial year for "the delivery of attendance and engagement programs" across the territory.
But, Ms Ayres said, while engagement programs can be beneficial, "nothing rivals good quality programming in schools".
"And that is just not possible under this funding model."
The department maintains that "all students enrolled are funded" because enrolment data is factored into how much money is allocated per student and because effective enrolment funding can increase or decrease depending on fluctuations in the overall enrolment number year-on-year.
It also said remote schools were allocated more funding per student than those in regional and urban centres.
Attendance plummets in recent years
Despite attempts to boost the number of First Nations students in classrooms, the department’s latest annual report shows territory-wide attendance rates in government schools have fallen from 65 per cent to 60 per cent over the past five years.
The downturn has been more severe in some remote schools, resulting in budgets being slashed by up to a quarter for the following year.
Yuendumu school, for example, had its funding reduced from $3.6 million in 2021 to $2.7 million this year — a decrease of 27 per cent.
"We now have enough data since effective enrolment has been introduced to show the residualisation happening has been systematic," Mr Yore said.
"Not only in remote communities, but we're seeing it's happening disproportionately to First Nations kids in urban and regional schools as well."
In response, the department said: "There are many drivers of low attendance that are outside of a school’s control including housing issues, employment and population mobility."
Funding model 'totally racist'
Mr Guyula, a Yolngu man and the independent member for Mulka, which covers north-east Arnhem Land, described the funding model as "totally racist".
"The Aboriginal children have a lower attendance and so they are the kids and the communities that are missing out," he said.
He believes funding should be kept in the school regardless of attendance rates to "uplift the equality in education".
"So that we have children [who can] graduate to be someone who they want to be," he said.
This year's NAPLAN results showed a huge discrepancy in outcomes between NT students in areas considered to be "very remote" and "outer regional".
In numeracy, 78 per cent of very remote Year 7 students were below the national standard, compared with 13 per cent in the regions.
In writing, the figure for very remote students was 86 per cent.
Mr Yore said the effective enrolment policy had widened the existing educational gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Territorians.
"If our federal and territory governments are fair dinkum about fulfilling the Uluru Statement from the Heart and the closing of the education gap that this necessitates … the effective enrolment policy [needs to be] abolished as a matter of urgency."
A separate review of the funding model, commissioned in 2017 by the education department, acknowledged the funding model resulted in reduced budgets in remote locations with a low socio-economic demographic and a high concentration of First Nations students.
"This is as expected, as the relationship between these characteristics and variable attendance are well known," the report stated.
Teachers 'set up to fail'
The system, according to Mr Yore, is also impacting educators, putting extra pressure on teachers amid a widespread staff shortage in the territory.
He said most teachers he has worked with in remote schools have expressed some degree of "psychological or physical burnout".
"Fundamentally, you are working in these amazing schools with passionate local staff and young people who want opportunities like any other, but you're all just set up to fail because you don't have the resources to get the job done."
He said remote schools were "some of the most special educational facilities we have in Australia" because of their bilingual and "two-way" learning programs.
"But the current funding structure is basically running them into the ground and we risk losing them forever."
All students are encouraged to attend school regardless of the school's effective enrolment.
But a senior teacher currently working in a remote government school — who did not want to be named — said some schools were unable to properly cater to all of their enrolled students because of under-resourcing.
"If every child, who all have a right to education, turned up at a school under effective enrolment funding that school would be totally unable to cope," they said.
The department did not respond directly to this claim, but said it was important to acknowledge the NT’s "student mobility and challenges to attendance" which result in fluctuating attendance and enrolment numbers year-on-year.
Calls for review to be released
The department said it has received a draft version of the review into the funding model, which was undertaken by Deloitte at a cost of almost $400,000.
The final report is expected to be released at the end of the year.
Regardless of its findings, Mr Yore said more government funding was needed in the territory’s public education system and effective enrolment had to be scrapped.
"There's no shiny policy or new curriculum or new silver bullet program that's going to do anything in these schools until you have more resourcing on the ground, and First Nations communities have control over how that resourcing is used to meet the learning needs of students," he said.
Having received philanthropic funding at his previous school in Yirrkala, on top of the government allocated funds, Mr Yore saw what difference extra money makes.
"We had students who had effectively left school, who we brought back in through an innovative re-engagement program," he said.
"Some of those students went on to be the first ever from the community to achieve an ATAR score and qualify for university."
