The future of Noel Pearson’s involvement in Queensland schools hangs in the balance as a potential impasse looms over a state government bid to limit the delivery of his contentious direct instruction (DI) curriculum.
The Indigenous leader has called for negotiations with the education department over his organisation’s role in two Cape York schools to be “conducted in fairness and good spirit”.
Pearson has had an at times fractious relationship with the department, protesting that he had been “verballed” by the state’s top education bureaucrat over claims of abusive behaviour.
But the department’s insistence on limiting school hours spent on DI – which prompted Pearson’s Good To Great Schools Australia to withdraw from Aurukun school – is set to be a stumbling block again in contract talks.
The negotiations over Coen and Hopevale, the remaining “lighthouse” schools under Pearson’s education agenda, are due to conclude by the end of 2016.
Following a review of Aurukun and DI, the department sought a binding agreement with GGSA over the joint running of Aurukun that included new measures for evaluating academic results and tighter oversight of finances.
That followed alleged financial “irregularities” at Aurukun, which are being examined by the state auditor general but which Pearson has attributed to poor book-keeping by Queensland education staff.
A spokeswoman for Pearson said the proposed conditions on financial reporting and academic evaluation were “not at all a sticking point”.
But the department’s insistence the school day finish at 2.30pm, rather than 4pm, was seen as a critical blow to the integrity of the DI program.
Pearson also wants to legally enshrine a partnership to deliver DI, which he says the government has refused.
The department is expected to seek the same terms for contracts over Coen and Hopevale, the latter being Pearson’s home town.
DI, the centrepiece of Pearson’s education platform and now used in remote Indigenous schools in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, has divided teachers, communities and politicians with its rigid scripting, emphasis on basic literacy and numeracy and the cost of ongoing monitoring by its US writers.
GGSA has pointed to recent Naplan results showing Coen had the best-performing year 3 class among the state’s Indigenous schools as proof DI is working.
The prospect of an impasse over DI comes after Pearson was forced to fend off fresh allegations of abusive behaviour, including calling Kate Jones, now the Queensland education minister, a “fucking white cunt” in 2009.
A statement on Pearson’s behalf said he “strenuously refuted the allegation that there was any disparaging comment directed to Kate Jones” at a Cairns meeting on wild rivers protection laws when she was the environment minister.
“Noel denies that he directed any conversation to her,” it said.
Pearson also rejected an account from a Coen nurse who lobbied against the adoption of DI at the local school that he called her a “fucking white cunt”.
The fresh claims of Pearson’s use of this term prompted condemnation on Monday from Pauline Hanson, who ironically emerged as the unlikely subject of a Pearson opinion piece for News Corp in which he tagged her as a potential champion of Indigenous Australians.
The director-general of education, Jim Watterson, wrote to Pearson in June, telling him that abuse of his staff doing the Aurukun review was unacceptable and that he himself had been called an “arse coverer”, “maggot” and “bucket of shit”.
A statement on Pearson’s behalf said he “believed that he was being verballed by Watterston, who was putting his one-sided account in writing to “use on a rainy day”. It accused Watterston of leaking the letter to the ABC and misinterpreting remarks not directed at him.
In a letter to Watterston on 24 June, Pearson apologised for their “exchange”.
“I too believed that we had established a collaborative, albeit it at times robust relationship, built on our mutual passion for Indigenous education,” Pearson said.
Pearson said he was “exhilarated and deeply wearied … in equal measure” at his choice to devote his life to Indigenous advancement.
“I am very conscious that at times that weariness makes me fractious but I am nothing if not honest, blunt and tenacious about our cause,” he said.
“You are an educator and I am a philosopher and social reformer. Despite your therefore superior status in this debate, it causes me great strain when a community like Aurukun is being torn apart by social strife and law and order challenges, yet one of the apexes of the debate is the merits of the pedagogy in the local school.”
