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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-09-27 Daily Xml
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Community Language Schools

Ms WORTLEY (Torrens) (14:30): My question is to the Minister for Multicultural Affairs. How is the Malinauskas Labor government supporting languages in our community?

The Hon. Z.L. BETTISON (Ramsay—Minister for Tourism, Minister for Multicultural Affairs) (14:31): Can I thank the member for Torrens for her question. She has one of the most diverse electorates in South Australia. On coming to government, we committed $16 million in additional funding to multicultural affairs, and $4 million of that went to community language schools.

I had the great honour of speaking at the National Community Language Conference. It is the first time it has been in Adelaide in 11 years. Can I say the feedback was absolutely fantastic—people feeling like they were listened to for the first time in a very long time.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! Minister, please be seated. Member for Morialta, you leave me no choice—137A, the remainder of question time.

The honourable member for Morialta having withdrawn from the chamber:

The SPEAKER: The minister has the call.

The Hon. Z.L. BETTISON: It's more than talk: it's action. That is why $4 million over four years is going to make a difference to our community language schools. There are 99 fully accredited community language schools in our state, teaching 47 different languages, and 8,000 students are enrolled. First and foremost, can I just take the time to thank the volunteers for these community language schools. They give up enormous amounts of time to make sure their language is passed on to their children and their grandchildren—the culture and traditions that can go on for future community leaders.

Of course, we talk about year 2. It's just shy of $1.1 million that we are giving to community language schools. There is a focus on premises, personnel and pathways. I am particularly pleased that we have been able to move and access TAFE locations for community language hubs. We are starting out with both Salisbury and Regency TAFE, and I thank the Minister for Education for his support.

Each campus is going to be initially supporting 200 students from four schools. That started last month. What we often see is primary schools being used for community language schools, which is fantastic, but by having a hub environment we can particularly support those upcoming schools and those very new schools to support each other.

In year 2, infrastructure funding will also be rolling out for $500,000, going to assist individual schools, particularly those schools that own their own premises. Eight multicultural organisations received this funding. Of course, I was really pleased last year when the challenge of only being able to use government schools for community languages has been moved on. Government, Catholic and independent schools can host these community language schools. They have funding if they host them on their campus.

The other thing that the community language schools are working on is a brand-new digital language hub. The hub will be a resources bank of electronic teaching material resources in Arabic, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Greek and Farsi. These languages account for 59 per cent of community language schools.

One of the other challenges they have is a bit of a dropout rate of kids between 14 and 17, as they get older. One of the key things this funding will be going on is how to keep and retain those students as they get older, particularly using not only the opportunity to go on to SACE but those in-language radio sessions, podcasts, things like that, which is what we are hearing from many others.

This is something that I heard a lot of in opposition and I am so pleased that we have been able to put a multicultural lens following on the support of education over many, many decades. We have a great diverse community. People are here from 200 different countries. What we have often seen is people had to suppress their ethnic backgrounds. Now we want people to feel equally important, for Australia to be respectful of their culture and their history. They are our great storytellers. They are going to be our great business leaders, selling our products and services to the world.

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