Activist, lawyer and Bagaarrmugu-Guggu Yalanji leader Noel Pearson said a failure to rethink the education system threatens to "fail children" and "destroy lives", particularly for those coming from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Mr Pearson issued the warning in the keynote address at the Archdiocese of Canberra & Goulburn Catholic Education system day on Ngunnawal country on Monday.

As co-chair of non-profit Good to Great Schools Australia, Mr Pearson helps deliver co-designed learning and explicit instruction; a direct, structured, teacher-led and achievement-oriented method of education, through 20 primary schools across the country.

The program focuses on improving literacy, numeracy and science outcomes of students, as well as developing teaching skills in staff.

Mr Pearson said explicit instruction can benefit disadvantaged students, whether they be from low-socioeconomic backgrounds, regional and remote Australia, and many of the country's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids.

"It's about the teacher leading the learner. Teaching first, learning second," he said

Mr Pearson has long been adamant on literacy being a key component to Closing the Gap.

He subscribes to the theory that 75 percent of students will develop literacy skills irrespective of the education afforded to them, as long as a competent method of education is delivered.

He believes the remaining quarter of children will fail to keep pace with their peers without explicit instruction.

Within schools, he says, many First Nations kids are at a deficit when entering the classroom.

"If Indigenous kids are learning English they need to be explicitly taught," Mr Pearson said.

"You can't just assume that if we expose these kids to books, and we read books to them, they'll get it. English is a foreign language for Indigenous kids."

"I think too much of education, when it comes to Indigenous kids assumes that well they're just they just are less competent English learners, rather than First Nations children with their own language."

He said the disadvantage can extend to Pasifika, migrant and refugee children.

In Mr Pearson's series of Boyer Lectures last year, he said literacy is vital to a child's engagement in school and overall life outcomes.

"Hiding in plain sight behind all of the factors involved in teenage disengagement and offending is prior primary school illiteracy," he said on Monday.

"Australian public discourse focuses on the symptoms of this failure and is completely blind to its cause."

He cited the example of an Aboriginal teenager named Chris who had fallen away throughout secondary school and had been identified by his mother as having learning difficulties and struggling to read.

Chris drowned under police pursuit aged 16.

"This is the pipeline from the failure to learn because of the failure to teach," Mr Pearson said.

He applauded the local diocese for their adoption of 'high-impact', scientifically-drawn instructionist teaching.

"Why has direct instruction and explicit instruction so steadfastly been objected to for 50 years, other than the fact that it's been characterised as traditional and conservative and punitive?," he asked.

"Do you think this is just an accident? That poor and disadvantaged children are denied the ability to learn to read effectively and efficiently if taught through explicit indirect methods?

"Why would you deny a child that, in favour of an ideological position against, other than the fact that that is how the world works? And that is how the world works for the most disadvantaged kids in society."