'Ten thousand illiterate, non-numerate teenagers and young men and women in their 20s are unemployable because of the educational failures of the last decade,' she said. 'Many Aboriginal schools do not have standard facilities, such as electricity, ablution blocks and teaching equipment.

'But the principal causes of the absence of literacy and numeracy are not physical shortcomings but separate Aboriginal curriculums and substandard teaching. Aboriginal children who live in the open Australian society and attend mainstream schools perform as well as their peers.'

Professor Hughes is a senior fellow with right-wing think-tank the Centre for Independent Studies. But she is no remote commentator on the situation facing black children; she has first-hand experience of just how badly educated they are.

Last year she arranged for two teenage girls from a remote territory community to stay with her in Sydney for several months to try to lift their education levels. She wrote about the experience and has now followed up with her latest, more general commentary.

'We knew the girls' schooling had been far below mainstream standards,' she said. 'The community had been trying to get full-time English-speaking teachers for years for its 60 or so school-age children because its own indigenous head teacher and teaching aides were losing their English literacy and maths skills.'

'Seagull' teachers, who flew in once, sometimes twice a week, or not at all, supplemented the indigenous teachers. The school operated two classes, one for five-to-12-year-olds and one for those up to the age of 18, most days of the week.

Although the girls had been recently tested and were found to be at Form One level of formal schooling literacy, Professor Hughes was astonished by their limited vocabulary, poor spelling and indiscriminate sprinkling of capital letters in the few sentences they were able to write to describe their journey to Sydney.

'Reading was worse. Only with great assistance could they read The Cat in the Hat,' she wrote. 'Their capacity to add numbers petered out after about 12 [and] subtraction was even more difficult.

'They knew no multiplication tables. They had no mental arithmetic capacity. I had been aware that school only operated for about two hours a day. Charlotte and Margaret exuded boredom with years of repetitive, automaton lessons.'

After 10 weeks of special tuition the two girls had advanced two years, although they were still in the early years of primary literacy. But Professor Hughes said they could not be asked to sit in a mainstream class of six- and seven-year-olds, nor could they be 'set up to fail' by being placed in a secondary school's year 11 or 12 classes with children their own ages.

Even introductory, catch-up year 10 classes for youngsters who had dropped out of secondary school would be too difficult for them until they developed their learning skills and improved their English.

'Paradoxically, the best way for them to catch up is likely to be to sit with immigrants or foreign students coming to Australia to learn English. The girls are not alone. There are at least 20 teenagers in their situation in their community alone.'

In her latest report, Professor Hughes said parents were constantly blamed for poor educational outcomes.

Three generations of welfare dependence and poor education had led to family and community dysfunction so that teen pregnancies, alcoholism, drug addiction and crowded housing often undermined school attendance.

But she said the main causes of non-attendance were the ineffective curriculums and poor teaching that resulted in children sitting in class year after year without learning.

'Indigenous parents are no longer prepared to be cajoled, pressured and bullied into second-rate, separate Aboriginal education for their children. They argue that they speak vernacular languages at home and that their communities teach children traditions and culture.

'Parents want their children taught mainstream curriculums in English from kindergarten so that they are truly fluent in English, fully literate and numerate and have computing skills, and so are prepared for jobs and life.'

Professor Hughes said more than 4,000 preschool places were needed immediately in the territory and all primary schooling should be raised to mainstream standards with fully equipped schools, mainstream curriculums and full-time qualified resident teachers.

'This would require more than 200 houses to be built for teachers. Likewise, training to ensure that Aboriginal teachers and assistant teachers who lacked mainstream qualifications become qualified was long overdue.

'If mainstream schooling is not deemed to be viable in very small communities, arrangements will have to be made to board children or assist their parents to move so that they can attend school.

'Remedial teaching for the indigenous early teenagers who have missed out on primary education is a major challenge for the Northern Territory. Their needs must be recognised and addressed. They cannot remain hidden in pretend secondary classes in remote locations.'

Among her other demands, Professor Hughes said indigenous children had to learn the full primary syllabus and have access to the same range of academic and vocational secondary courses, equipped and taught to mainstream standards, as non-indigenous students.

All remote schools should be 'twinned' with mainstream schools so that exchanges of students, teachers and parents could expose substandard conditions and enable Australians to learn at first hand how their taxes were being spent.

She said the cost to the territory government alone to address the problems of indigenous education could be as high as A$1 billion (HK$7.22 billion) - a sum she doubted would ever be provided.

'These young people's education has made them more foreign in their own country than the latest immigrants from Somalia. Indigenous youngsters are incredibly vulnerable in their remote communities, where only an occasional hunt or search for bush food may break the anomie of an endless string of workless days,' Professor Hughes concluded.

'They are even more vulnerable when they visit Darwin, Alice Springs or other towns. The stories of indigenous youngsters staging break-ins to get into jail for the regular meals, sport and literacy classes it offers are not apocryphal.'