Very interesting. Now you know why the Mine scores just one day per week of my services as an ESL teacher, despite being 80+% Language Background Other Than English, even if the needs at the Mine are not all that dire in fact.
Since 1983 the number of students denied ESL help has tripled to 41,158. And since 1993 not one extra ESL teacher has been employed despite a steady increase in the number of students requiring help.
NSW Teachers Federation senior vice-president Angelo Gavrielatos said the neglect of ESL students’ needs put them at risk of dropping out.
“If this brief was about white, middle-class students . . . there would be an outcry and calls for a royal commission, yet somehow this does not even rate because it’s about non-English-speaking-background, migrant and refugee students,” he said…
David Gilbert, executive member of the Public Schools Principals Forum, said in his 13 years as a principal in the Fairfield area the resource had become increasingly scarce.
At his school, Governor Philip King Public School in Edensor Park, 80 per cent of the students come from 45 language backgrounds.
Four ESL teachers have to cope with 600 pupils who require language assistance at the school.
“It’s a deliberate attempt by the Government to keep costs down,” Mr Gilbert said.
A spokeswoman for NSW Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt said Commonwealth funding was no longer adequate for ESL students, who make up more than a quarter of students in NSW public schools.
Carmel Tebbutt’s spokeswoman is quite right actually. The Federal Funding tap has been directed away from anything “multicultural”, and there you have Howard’s not-so-crypto-Hansonism on display. One has been able to see this very clearly in the years since 1996. I examine this shift (leap?) away from the progress made under Keating, indeed under Malcolm Fraser (of Howard’s own party but far from Howard’s mind) after about 1978, in a comparison I made between the 1997 and 2003 editions of Face the Facts, a publication of the Australian Government’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission. It was first published in 1997 when it still to an extent reflected the consensus arrived at during the Fraser-Hawke-Keating Prime Ministerships, even though even at that time a comparison with the draft policy issued under Keating showed a shift away from “diversity” to “harmony” under Howard. My contention is that the latest revision (2003) represents an even greater shift along a particular ideological path. While some of this may be explained by changes in the state of the world since 1997, much cannot be.
