NT Schools in Crisis
Not everyone in Australia gets a full education. This investigative series unearthed a $214 million funding gap in the Northern Territory's education budget, which left some classrooms without power, water or full-time qualified teachers. Published by The Australian, the series scrutinised a funding system that concentrated underfunding in disadvantaged schools, in ways that many claim constitutes systemic racism and is a violation of Australia's human rights obligations. The year-long investigation resulted in widespread calls for federal intervention in the NT education system, eventually helping secure a $1 billion funding increase for NT schools.
NT Schools in Crisis won five NT Media Awards and the 2024 Walkley Award for Indigenous Affairs reporting.
If the students at Gamardi are lucky, a teacher will turn up two days a week. For whole months, nobody comes. And then there is the sorry excuse for a classroom.
While lush lawns and gardens welcome students inside Alyangula, less than 20km away, Angurugu’s imposing gates present a bleak, very different picture.
Attendance rates at remote Northern Territory schools are as low as 18.7 per cent and have been falling for a decade, with an overall attendance rate of 73.4 per cent.
A decade-old policy that stopped providing high school education in remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory has had “disastrously bad” outcomes, research has shown, with some affected children joining criminal gangs.
More than half of the Northern Territory’s $1.179bn education budget helps to support a “bloated bureaucracy”, which many say is at the expense of remote schools, some of which don’t have power, water or full-time registered teachers.
Until recently, these children’s education was endangered. To save it, their community had to walk away from the NT government education system and create their own.
NT families should have “more choice” in schooling, Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney says, highlighting the lack of secondary education in remote communities.
The NT Government has signed on to a federal agreement despite its own data showing declining results and diminishing aspirations, particularly for Indigenous students.
A damning secret report has uncovered a ‘culture of acceptance’ and ‘cover-ups’ as it’s revealed a pedophile teacher convicted of offences against two young students was the subject of complaints for at least five years.
The NT school system is failing students by leaving at least one in five effectively unfunded, offering an education so bad that most fail minimum literacy and numeracy standards.
The Northern Territory government’s “broken” education funding model has left some schools with budgets more than $9m short of what they were supposed to receive.
Underinvestment in education is sentencing the NT to a range of social and economic fallout. NT Schools in Crisis explores the heartbreaking reasons some kids don’t make it to school regularly.
NT teachers and Education Department staff say they have been blacklisted, bullied or threatened with losing their if they speak out, raising allegations of a severe lack of transparency within the government.
An alleged violation of the human right to education has prompted calls for a royal commission in the NT and raised the possibility of a class-action suit on behalf of students.
NT Education Minister Eva Lawler should quit over the crisis in schools because she was “too lazy and too incompetent” to fix the broken funding model, Independent MLA Robyn Lambley has demanded.
The NT’s youth crime rate is linked to under-investment in education, says the National Children’s Commissioner, pointing to the huge cost of detaining children instead of fixing schools.
The NT Government has pledged to ditch attendance-based school funding, as data analysis reveals the controversial model diverted money from remote Indigenous students to Darwin schools.
