Federal Minister for Education, Julia Gillard in Discussing Indigenous Education Mentions Micromanagement. (December 29, 2008)

In today's Australian Samantha Maiden reports on the Federal Minister for Education and current acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard's promises $2.3 billion over the next four years to improve indigenous education, and she spoke disparagingly of endless pilot programs "that never end up making a system-wide change".

 She went on to refer to the: "big gap in life expectancy, in educational attainment, between indigenous Australians and non-indigenous Australians; that is our focus," and referring to a proposal by  Aboriginal leader Pat Dodson "not a bill of rights, but practical action to close the gap."

Ms Gillard went on to say that previously governments had not only failed to empower educators to get on with the job but also to hold them accountable.

She concluded:

When I saw [regarding literacy and numeracy the] state breakdowns and the figures for the Northern Territory, I was shocked. I suppose you know in your head it is bad but, when you see figures like that, it really is something that hits you in the guts and we've got to make a difference to it.

For the first time we are not going to micromanage programs from Canberra; that's been done in the past and often it has ... ended up in small scale pilots which never grew into major national changes.
 

We are allowing both non-government and government schools to use the money more flexibly but in an accountability target that means they have to give us the data about how indigenous students are going.
 

They have to break that data down showing results for indigenous students. They will be held accountable for the results and we will get the data to measure progress.

Every child has to come out of schooling able to read and write English; it's the language of work, it's the language of higher learning in this country.

Indigenous kids are only going to be able to get a fair access to education, to the world of work and the best this nation has to offer if they learn English at school.

When it comes to the end game, will Ms Gillard's good intentions bring forth a revolution in Indigenous education, and will the Rudd government really eschew micromanagement -- the use of "accountability" and the approach to "data collection" can have a severe micro-managerial sting unless applied with discretion.