Closing Educational Gap in Northern Territories

This assignment delves into the critical issue of educational inequality in the Northern Territories of Australia. Despite being a crucial backbone for development, education has been severely impacted by historical colonization and socioeconomic factors. The aboriginal population faces significant barriers, including limited access to schools, qualified teachers, and transportation. To address this issue, regular reviews of the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy are required, along with policies to promote parental and community engagement in education. Implementing these measures is essential to bridging the educational gap and ensuring a better future for Indigenous Australians.

Running head: ECONOMICS ASSIGNMENT
Economics assignment
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Introduction:
Education is one of the essential and integral parts of every economy that aids it to have
growth through optimal utilisation of the resources and ability to develop essential technologies
(Fägerlind and Saha 2016). Considering the case of Australia it can be seen that the country has
high literacy rate; however, in recent days an increasing public discourse throughout the
Northern Territories has came to rigorous debates (Alford and Muir 2004). Being the residents of
the Northern Territories one can outline that rising number of colonisation in the past has
resulted in domination of foreign culture over the ethnicity of the native Australian. It has not
only deprived them from the economic perspective, in addition it has lead to segregation in
various other factors like education, housing, employment opportunities (Ullah 2016). In this
context, this essay is aimed to discuss the effect of past history of remoteness of many towns in
the Northern Territories from perspective of an indigenous Australian who is living in this area
for his whole life. Moreover, through critically analyzing the present scenario of the Northern
Territories, it will provide education framework that can address the requirement of education for
the indigenous people.
Recognizing the truth of the past:
Australia is one of the developed nations; however during being one of the mineral rich
countries it attracted lots of colonisation since 1788 (Alford and Muir 2004). According to the
Altman (2006), repercussion effect of this colonisation has brought destructive effect on the
economic and social structure of the native Australians. Ranging from land dispossession of the
aboriginals to suppression of the native languages of the indigenous Australians in the Northern
Territory has demolished the civic as well as the social culture of the remote Northern Territory
towns. Next to this, over increasing external political influence and excessive welfare

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dependency has provided government basis for collapsing the organisation throughout Northern
Territories. One of the most crippling blows was come in as the form of inadequate social service
for the aboriginals. Over the period it has been observed that public expenditure for the issues
related to health and education of the native Australians has gradually decreased. It has lead to
poor socioeconomic as well as academic performance of the indigenous people from Australia.
According to the (Biddle 2011), successive government plans has failed to consider the
importance of separate education plan for the aboriginals, which has caused in poor literacy rate
of the native Australians. Moreover, it has also been found that assimilation policies by the
Australian government has summarily ignored the views and need of indigenous Australians
leading to high dropouts and poor standard of living. Since, last three decades there has been
merely no improvement in the education front in the Northern Territories and education
assistance from government has fell short to the desired level leading to widening gap between
indigenous and non-indigenous people.
Critical analysis of the present situation:
Indigenous Australians are the native Australians who are presently being suffering from
serious issues of colonisation in the country during the past centuries. Recent analysis of the
socioeconomic parameters highlights that aboriginals are having poor outcomes compared to the
non-indigenous population of the country. Considering the drastic exploitation of the lives of the
indigenous Australians, disadvantage in the field of education is broad in present day. According
to the statistics, more than 45.65% of the aboriginal adults are functionally illiterate and 51% of
native Australian population fails to achieve the national minimum average in grammar, spelling
and punctuation (Allen 2015).18% of the native Australian population from the towns of
Northern Territories has failed to achieve national minimal in writing and reading standards

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during the 2015 (Anderson et al. 2016). According to the same source, Compared to this, literacy
rate of non-aboriginal population of Australia is as high as 96.4%. These figures portray the real
gap between the education of the native Australians and the non-aboriginals. In this regard it is
essential to look into the current policy framework of the indigenous Australian population,
which mainly rotates around six targets of Closing the Gap agenda of the Australian government.
Australian population from Northern have been subject to welfare programs from the
government and through excessive dependence on the welfare payment education system of this
area has been hampered largely. Aboriginal population of Australia until 1980 were summarily
excluded from the access of mainstream provisions like health, education, income support,
housing and others leading to poor standard of living for the aboriginal people (Fägerlind and
Saha 2016). Besides this, depending upon the external political influence, government has
restricted the native Australians to participate in all state-funded service that has hampered the
literacy rate of the aboriginal population greatly and the wellbeing too. Northern Territories
According to the education plan of the Australian government have lowest amount of literacy
rate. According to the research of (Pearson 2005), low attendance rate and high dropout of the
aboriginal students has restricted the growth path of the native Australians. Moreover, lack of
unbiased framework for education of the people from Northern Territories has acted as the
stimuli for the government to exploit the whole native Australian system and perform according
to the directives of the social programs.
Problem solving:
Education is the backbone of development and in the case of Northern Territories it is
highly crucial to have an organised program plan for promoting education. As it has been
observed that aboriginals have high child illiteracy rate, thus it is important that government need

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to provide better access to school and employ qualified teachers for the children under the
National Partnership Agreement on Early Childhood Education program (Timms et al. 2014).
One of the major issues in the Northern Territories is lack of school owing to little number of
populations in certain areas. Besides this, lack of encouragement among the indigenous families
to send their children to school is affecting the education level of these areas. Thus, as the
solution to this problem, it would be ideal to promote the necessity of education among the
aboriginal parents largely under the Parental and Community Engagement Program. As the
resident of the Northern Territories it can be seen that access to high quality education is limited
to the aboriginals and in the remote areas there is lack of transportation, roads and secondary
schools that hampers the stimuli to go to the school. Besides this, vast history of colonisation has
influenced the education system largely leading to biasness in education. Lower school
attendance is another outcome of the biased education system in Australia (Pearson 2005). In
order to increase the literacy rate of this region, regular reviewing of National Assessment
Program for Literacy and Numeracy is required and additional team is required to check over the
biasness factor of the education system. Through proper policy implementation and better
connectivity with the school can enhance the education level greatly. Besides this, the Northern
Territories require transportation badly, thus new roads and better communication is another
important factor necessary for solving the educational gap.
Conclusion:
Aboriginals are limited to the Northern Territories; however they are the only surviving
population who knows the socio cultural history of the Australia. Over exploitation of the
country’s cultural value during the era of colonisation has largely affected the socioeconomic
parameters of the aboriginals. Education has largely been affected and presently there is a huge

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gap among the different region of Australia and remote areas of Northern Territories. Present
scenario of the education system of Northern Territories highlight immediate actions to keep it
on the track. As the resident of the Northern Territories it can be said that education framework
mentioned above need to be implemented as soon as possible for better future of the real
Australians and let the socioeconomic discrimination vanish from the country.

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Reference:
Alford, K. and Muir, J., 2004. Dealing with unfinished Indigenous business: the need for
historical reflection. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 63(4), pp.101-107.
Altman, J., 2006. The Future of Indigenous Australia: Is there a path beyond the free market or
welfare dependency. Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National
University, Canberra. Compendio internacional de prácticas, 185.
Biddle, N., 2011. Measures of Indigenous wellbeing and their determinants across the
lifecourse. Income, Work and Indigenous Livelihoods.
Pearson, N., 2005. Can Cape York communities be economically viable?. Viewpoint, Cape York
Institute for Policy & Leadership, Cairns, Qld.
Fägerlind, I. and Saha, L.J., 2016. Education and national development: A comparative
perspective. Elsevier.
Ullah, A., 2016. Globalization and the Health of Indigenous Peoples: From Colonization to Self-
rule (Vol. 15). Taylor & Francis.
Allen, K., 2015. Past Traumas, Present Griefs: Exploring the Effects of Colonialism,
Microaggressions, and Stereotyping from Wild West Shows to Indigenous Literature. University
of Arkansas.
Timms, L., Williams, C., Stokes, S.F. and Kane, R., 2014. Literacy skills of Australian
Indigenous school children with and without otitis media and hearing loss. International journal
of speech-language pathology, 16(3), pp.327-334.