Backwards step on Closing the Gap action as early childhood development for Indigenous Australians falls short

Australia is already off target to meet a key Closing the Gap goal, just two years after the revised targets were introduced.

Data released by the Productivity Commission on Thursday shows that progress toward a 10-year target of having 55% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children meeting national early development goals took a backward step in 2020-21, with just 34.3% meeting the threshold, down from 55.2% in 2018.

To meet the target, children need to be assessed as developmentally on track in all five domains of the Australian Early Childhood Development Census, a metric taken just before children start school.

It is one of three targets covered in data released on Thursday. The rate of imprisonment for Indigenous children also fell in 2020-21, to 23.3 per 10,000.

Australia has already met and beaten a target to ensure 95% of First Nations children are enrolled in at least one year of full-time early childhood education before they start primary school. In 2020-21, 96.7% of Indigenous children nationally were enrolled in a preschool program.

The new Closing the Gap targets were set in 2020, after a co-design process between state and territory governments and peak Aboriginal organisations. They are intended to encourage and direct funding to areas of need while holding governments accountable for failing to invest in or meet targets around priority areas for reform.

The data showed greater improvement in girls compared to boys, with 27.1% of boys assessed in 2021 showed they were on track, compared to 41.6% of girls.

Steep declines against the five AEDC domains were also recorded in remote areas compared to major cities, where 38.4% of children assessed showed they were on track, compared to 27.8% in remote areas and 16.1% in very remote areas.

Girls showed the greatest improvement, with the data showing 41.6% of girls assessed in 2021 were on track across all five domains compared to 27.1% of boys.

The target is to reduce the rate of detention by at least 30% by 2031, with the new data showing a steeper decline than expected in 2019-20 and 2020-21.

The Northern Territory and Queensland both showed slight increases in the youth Indigenous imprisonment rate in 2020-2021 compared to 2019-2020, while South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia and New South Wales showed slight declines. The Australian Capital Territory and Tasmania did not provide data.

Boys aged 10 to 17 from First Nations backgrounds in Queensland were jailed at a rate of 58.1 per 10,000 in 2020-21, up from 55.6 per 10,000 in 2019-20.

In the Northern Territory, Aboriginal boys aged 10-17 were jailed at a rate of 47.3 per 10,000 in 2020-21, compared to 38.7 per 10,000 in 2019-20.