NSW community languages – Education Minister’s awards under threat

PSA Senior Industrial Officer Greg Shaw today described as contradictory the decision by NSW education and training minister, Dr Andrew Refshauge, to present awards for student excellence in community languages last night while proceeding with job cuts that will destroy this important program and future awards’ nights.

The Community Languages Program administered by the Department of Education and Training (DET) involves $2.4 million of Commonwealth and State funds to teach 32,000 students through 470 community-based languages schools.

At the same time, the government is proceeding with a restructure in the Department of Education and Training that will cut 1000 jobs including half of the support staff that administer this important program.

"The minister will be handing out awards for student excellence, which show what a great job the Community Languages Program achieves, in part through the hard work and dedication of the staff which administer it."

"But at the same time, he's slashing the jobs of the staff who support this important program, which will gut the program and rule out future awards nights."

"The minister would have the community believe that the 1000 job cuts announced in June were about slashing non-essential "bureaucratic" jobs but the reality is that these cuts will deeply hurt many crucial areas of educational support and delivery", said Shaw.

DET unveiled its Lifelong Learning proposal in June under the rubric of putting more resources into teaching and learning, and eliminating duplication between DET and TAFE, with the aim of saving $70 million through job cuts. The bulk of job cuts will affect members of the Public Service Association and the services they deliver. The Community Languages Program staff were told on September 24 they would be cut in half, leaving them unable to function.

The awards ceremony last night was attended by over 1300 parents, students and teachers, to see 213 awards given for 34 languages, including 10 ministerial awards for excellence in language proficiency, culture and community leadership.

The PSA is calling on the Minister to reverse the planned DET and TAFE job cuts.

For more information: Greg Shaw, Senior Industrial Officer, 0408 474 224.

Information from Department of Education and Training website

Community Languages Schools are community-based, non-profit-making schools, established by communities whose first/heritage language is not English in order to maintain and develop their language and cultural heritage.

They conduct classes in languages other than English on a part-time basis, outside regular school hours. Most Community Languages Schools are for school-aged children but some conduct classes for adults and pre-schoolers as well. Currently Community Languages Schools offer 47 languages in 454 schools to approximately 32,000 students.

Contact details for the community-based languages schools are available through the schoolfinder link from DET's website, http://www.det.nsw.edu.au/eas/commlang/schoolfinder/index.html

The languages taught through the existing program include:
Armenian, Assyrian, Bengali, Cantonese, Croatian, Dari, Filipino, Finnish, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Mandean, Mandarin, Maori, Persian, Polish, Portugese, Punjabi, Russian, Samoan, Serbian, Sinhala, Somali, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukraine, Urdu/Ara, Vietnamese