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3 December 2004
A Charles Darwin University academic has been invited to work with a United Nations advisory body to help improve education systems around the world.
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Charles Darwin University's Associate Professor Ibtisam Abu-Duhou |
Associate Professor Ibtisam Abu-Duhou, has been elected to the International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP) Governing Board as a Consultant Fellow. IIEP was created by UNESCO in 1963 and people are invited on the basis of their contributions to various fields of educational planning.
Associate Professor Abu-Duhou said she was honoured to be working for IIEP indicating that it will dovetail into her new role at Charles Darwin University.
“The IIEP is an international centre for training and research specialising in educational planning and management. At its core the Fellow role is essentially a global focus of what I am doing at Charles Darwin,” she said.
Palestinian born Associate Professor Abu-Duhou joined Charles Darwin University in September this year as the inaugural Ian Potter Foundation Education Economist bringing to the institution a remarkable background in researching and evaluating education systems in the Middle East, France, Pakistan, Malaysia, the USA and Australia.
Additionally she has worked with international organisations such as AusAID, the World Bank; UNESCO; UNICEF and the EU.
Her research has related to the economics of education, specifically the allocation of resources, costs-effectiveness, budgeting and review of expenditures on education, policy and planning at both national and international levels, comparative studies in socio-economic and cultural aspects of schooling as well as numerous comparative studies of education systems.
“A large part of my role at Charles Darwin is a focus on the cost effectiveness of different interventions aimed at redressing the achievement gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous school students in both the Northern Territory and Australia, through an understanding of the main contributors to this gap,” she said.
“For example, an outcome of 2002 testing in the Northern Territory saw 20 per cent of remote indigenous students achieved the numeracy benchmark at the Year 5 level, compared to 61 per cent urban indigenous students and 91 per cent non-indigenous students.
“Where the national average percentage of students reaching reading benchmark was 90 per cent, 26 per cent of Indigenous students reached this standard in the Territory.
“Despite this national tragedy, there was little information available on what might constitute the best buys for education investment if there are to be significant turn around on these appalling outcomes” Associate Professor Abu-Duhou said.
The NT Government’s multi-million dollar antidote to the problem – the Accelerated Literacy Expansion Program – is a promising intervention program developed through the University’s School of Social and Policy Research.
Experts like Associate Professor Abu-Duhou hope to provide an extensive interrogation of its requirements and benefits to ensure the national program is truly robust.
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