According to the web site of the Government in Australia, the Land Down Under is facing some serious threats in its more rural public schools where students are getting far lower test scores than the national average for the country. The web site is designed to show parents about the testing in national numeracy and literacy in more than ten thousand national schools and it shows those results across the grades 3, 5, 7 and 9. In addition, it ranks the schools to show the disadvantages they face by using the Index of Community Socio Educational Advantage. Parents from around the nation flooded the sight seeking information and have crashed it quite a few times already. When an Australian news paper looked into the site’s findings, it found that in a number of schools where the proportion of the students skewed towards 90% Indigenous Australians versus those that were far more mixed, every single school the paper picked ended up being rated as disadvantaged. In those remote locations the paper selected, only one choice is available in terms of a Government school and almost all of them are far smaller than those in Australian cities.
The lower scores for these remote schools were in the subjects of numeracy, writing, grammar, reading, spelling and punctuation. This, say critics of the Australian educational system, shows that those schools not located in major metro areas are at an extreme disadvantage when compared with their metro counterparts. A handful of the remote schools did do a little better, but this was very rare compared to the almost uniform high levels of achievement for city schools.
