Four steps to meet a deadline

Such a scheme would need to be backed up with suitable childcare and pre-school places as well as LLN, non-vocational and vocational programs. Add to these six-monthly bonuses to parents to maintain pre-school children in childcare and kindergartens for a number of required hours. Australia would then have an excellent stick-and-carrot system for early childhood development.

Performance based pay for teaching professionals

In Western Australia, teachers and principals are paid incentives to teach in remote areas but there are no incentives to reach basic benchmarks such as school attendance and retention. The scheme attracts mostly graduate teachers. In addition to this scheme, performance-based pay should be introduced to attract more experienced educational professionals to remote schools.

Incentives to parents and pupils

Parenting is so fundamental but if parents lose motivation then perhaps the profit motive could have a role. After all mainstream Australia embraced a modest bonus payment introduced by the Howard Government to boost immunisation rates from third world levels. At the end of every school year, parents could be paid bonuses or have their children’s nest egg accounts topped up for their children attending required school hours. To motivate pupils in Years 9 and over, inducements targeting youths could increase with each successfully graduated year.

Youth transitions reforms

A number of existing schemes aimed at improving school retention and youth transitions currently compete with one another. Consolidation of these programs is now overdue. The Commonwealth should ensure that “at risk” pupils receiving Youth Allowance negotiate enforceable educational agreements with parents and service providers.

At the same time, attractive viable contracts with flexible funding to remote service providers could be offered to ensure improvements to the amenity and tuition of learning environments and the quality of education, life skills and employability for students and school leavers alike.

Reforms along these lines would yield almost immediate benefits among Indigenous literacy, numeracy and jobless indicators.

Indigenous parents should not have to wait until there are newly built and staffed dormitories in four or five years’ time to experience tangible improvements in their children’s education.

After all, Australia has a deadline to meet.