783 ABC Alice Springs

E&OE TRANSCRIPT 783 ABC Alice Springs – Nadine Maloney 12/08/2014 SUBJECTS: Vision 2020, working with state and territory education ministers to wipe out trachoma, direct instruction, bilingual education, visiting schools in the APY Lands NADINE MALONEY: You’re probably familiar with Christopher Pyne, the Federal Education Minister. He’s been in politics for a long time now. But did you know his dad was based here in Alice Springs in the ‘50s as a doctor with the RFDS? The Minister says that connection to the centre and his dad’s work here has led his continued interest in Indigenous health. I spoke with Christopher Pyne earlier this morning. CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Good morning, Nadine. NADINE MALONEY: You’re visiting schools and also health clinics, I believe, on the APY Lands and across Central Australia. What’s the main purpose of your visit? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, the main purpose is I’m visiting here with Vision 2020, which is an organisation run by Hugh Taylor, who’s one of the world advocates for opposing and destroying trachoma, particularly in Indigenous communities, and Australia is the only developed country that still has trachoma. Admittedly it’s only about four per cent in Australia, but it’s still a disease we could eradicate. And Hugh Taylor is the professor Melbourne University who is leading that charge. I’m here with him visiting the APY Lands in South Australia and also health clinics here in Alice Springs and combining that with some visits to some schools as the Education Minister just to continue my knowledge gathering tour of Australia, I suppose. NADINE MALONEY: Why the interest in Indigenous eye health and trachoma treatment for you? It is outside your education portfolio. CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, of course, if you can’t see, if you have impaired vision, then, of course, you’re not able to learn. So it makes it much harder to read and to write, et cetera, so it is an education focus, but actually my father was a Royal Flying Doctor here in Alice Springs in the 1950s and he was a GP then. That’s what led him to become an eye surgeon, his knowledge of glaucoma and trachoma amongst Indigenous people, and because of that he became an ophthalmologist and worked over a lifetime to help eradicate glaucoma and trachoma. NADINE MALONEY: What do you – as you were growing up as a young boy, what do you remember about what your dad used to tell you about being a Royal Flying Doctor? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, fascinating really. I mean, we have a number of artefacts that he collected when he was an ophthalmologist and as a GP in Alice Springs. We have a nulla nulla, for example, that was given to us by one of his patients when she arrived as a patient on the tarmac at Alice Springs Airport and was whirling the nulla nulla around her head because she was blind from cataracts and he operated on those cataracts and removed them and she regained her sight and she gave him her nulla nulla as a gift to say thank you. So growing up, I was very aware of Indigenous culture and Indigenous health. It was something we talked about a lot around the kitchen table. So as a cabinet minister, I’m taking a particular interest not only in education, but also in how we can remove some of the barriers that stop Indigenous Australians from being able to reach their full potential, like, for example, vision impairedness. NADINE MALONEY: Given the experience and the knowledge that you have of what your father went through and what your father saw, what have you made so far of what you’ve seen with trachoma treatment so far on this trip? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well, we’re making tremendous progress in Australia at addressing trachoma and we only now have trachoma in Indigenous communities, and I think we can, through schools, really finish it off, if you like, by getting children to wash their hands and wash their faces. I want to work with Peter Chandler and the education ministers around Australia to make sure that mirrors are installed in bathrooms around the schools and the preschools of the Territory and South Australia and elsewhere, and in all the bathrooms in every school there are signs up which indicate that people should not just wash their hands, but wash their faces to remove the carriers, if you like, of the trachoma disease. NADINE MALONEY: And, indeed, soap. I’ve been to some schools in the Territory in my role with the ABC visiting some schools and have gone to use one of the bathrooms, staff or students, and there’s been no soap in the bathroom whatsoever. CHRISTOPHER PYNE: And these are just basic, basic things, aren’t they, that are not hard to deal with, and I would have thought that we can make sure that in the next five to 10 years we end trachoma in Australia through some of the basics like soap, mirrors, bathrooms where people are encouraged to wash their faces as well as their hands and remove the insidiousness of trachoma. So I’m looking forward to working with the state and territory governments and with Vision 2020 to bring that about. NADINE MALONEY: You’re listening to 783 ABC Alice Springs, the Federal Education Minister, Christopher Pyne, is in Alice Springs having a chat with me this morning and on to another topic now, Minister. The Northern Territory Education Minister, Peter Chandler, is visiting Cape York again today. He’s going there to look at the schools and their direct instruction method and how it seems to be working quite well there. The Federal Government has funded a roll-out of the direct instruction programs to remote regions. Why are you so dead-set keen on this style of teaching; direct instruction? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well because it works. Direct instruction and its sister explicit instruction, work in all communities. Not just rural and remote communities, but where it’s harder to source teachers, of course, direct instruction is particularly useful. And it’s been proven to be useful in Cape York. I think direct instruction, which is another way of saying orthodox teaching, the use of phonics in primary school to help people to sound words and write words, is a method that actually brings about the outcomes that we want, which is children who can read and write and count and then go on to other subjects throughout their schooling. So, the reason we’re in favour of direct instruction is because we’re in favour of putting students first, not ideology, and we believe that we know that it is a method that brings about the results that parents and students want. NADINE MALONEY: But there are plenty of critics of direct instruction, some saying that it doesn’t work for all children. It is so heavily scripted; basically, the teachers stand at the front of the classroom and it’s reading a script - very, very scripted. Where’s the creativity in schooling that way? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: [Indistinct] everything Nadine, it doesn’t matter what you do, there are always critics and some of those critics are just ideologically opposed to that method of orthodox teaching that I and many others went through growing up. But we know that if you can’t read and you can’t write and you can’t count, it makes it very hard for you in life to get ahead. Now, direct instruction is quite prescriptive, in comparison to explicit instruction, but in lots of rural and remote schools, it is the method that works best because it helps the teacher to bring about the outcomes they need with very clear instructions. Now, I’m prepared to put up with the critics if it means that the young people at school get the outcomes that they want in their schooling. NADINE MALONEY: What’s the difference between direct instruction, though, which was developed - what, about 40 years ago in the States; and the olden day, teaching by rote, repetition, repetition, repetition? Why not just bring that back? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well direct instruction is a more sophisticated method of teaching and of course, it’s a holistic method. So, it also involves culture, it involves music, language; in Indigenous communities, part of the day is spent on maths or English, but part of the day is also spent on culture and music, so it helps to educate the whole child and it’s a method that I’m very supportive of and we’ve put $22 million into trying to roll it out across rural and remote schools in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland. NADINE MALONEY: You are visiting schools as part of this trip to the centre. What are you thinking about bilingual education? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well the first education – the first language in Australia, of course, is English, but for many communities in Indigenous Australia, their first language is a local language. So, what we need to try and do is cater for both of those things. It would be, I don’t think, a constructive thing for students to emerge from school having as their first language an Indigenous language that doesn’t marry with the rest of the society, because it would make it harder for them to get employment and harder for them to be part of the community, but in many schools there needs to be an understanding that the first language for many young people is their Indigenous language and we need to work on that. And I’m not against that whatsoever. We want 40 per cent of all of Year 12s, for example, studying a language other than English by the time they finish school, so that marries very much with our ambitions to broaden our communities’ understanding of other cultures. NADINE MALONEY: Is there room for that sort of bilingual education under the direct instruction method? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: I’m sure there is. NADINE MALONEY: You’ve visited already the Yirara College in Alice Springs; I believe you’re off to Yipirinya School in Alice Springs today. What are you doing there? CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Well I visited Yirara yesterday because I have a particular support for boarding schools and especially Indigenous boarding schools, like Yirara, and I’m visiting Yipirinya this morning, you’re right, to talk to the teachers, to talk to the principal and talk to the students, hopefully, about the things that we’re doing well, the things that we could do better; and that’ll help me inform my views about the kinds of things we need to do in education to make the outcomes for our students the best they can be. NADINE MALONEY: Christopher Pyne, nice to talk to you, thanks very much for your time this morning. CHRISTOPHER PYNE: Glad to catch up, thanks Nadine.