‘Fine states’ over truants

INDIGENOUS leader and former Labor Party national president Nyunggai Warren Mundine has called for the states and territories to be fined unless school attendance by indigenous students improves.

Mr Mundine told The Australian the latest Closing The Gap report masks the severity of the problem.

Released on Monday, the 10th annual progress report on the push to reduce indigenous disadvantage showed no improvement in the national school attendance rate for indigenous students.

Attendance fell 4 per cent in the Territory, while the national attendance level — which measures the proportion of students attending school at least 90 per cent of the time — was 48 per cent for indigenous students last year. The My School website shows some NT schools have attendance levels below 10 per cent. There are two schools where attendance levels are zero, meaning not one child attends school at least 90 per cent of the time.

Mr Mundine said research showed students needed to be at school at least 90 per cent of the time to avoid falling behind. “My little fantasy would be to see fines for the state and territory governments for their failure to meet targets for attendance rates,” he said, adding that governments were reaping billions of dollars and needed to be held to account.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion told The Australian the federal government’s Remote School Attendance Strategy had turned around falling rates of attendance in 77 remote schools but it was “disappointing” improvements were not widespread.

“The Territory … is the only jurisdiction we continue to have serious concerns about attendance data,” he said.

NT Education Minister Eva Lawler said it was “not acceptable that some of our schools have extremely low student attendance rates. We need schools, families and the community working together to support young people to attend school every day.”

“My little fantasy would be to see fines for the state and territory governments”