What follows is an account of the on-arrival school program that was provided for many years at Midway in Maribyrnong (a suburb of Melbourne) and replicated in over a dozen similar settlement centres around Australia.
Midway English Language Centre, staffed and operated by the Education Department of Victoria, was located within the boundaries of Midway Settlement Centre (also known locally as Midway migrant hostel) on commonwealth land. The language centre was only one of a suite of services provided for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers by various authorities and located within the settlement centre. The centre had no boundary fence, and hundreds of people -- visitors, service providers, family contacts and so on -- drifted in and out each day.
Service providers at Midway mostly worked for one or other state or federal department, including the Adult Migrant Education Program, the Commonwealth Employment Service, Social Security, the Ministry of Housing, the Health Department and the Immigration Department, but there were some others too such as the Commonwealth Bank, a few shops and various charities. The rest of the centre was made up of hundreds and hundreds of fully-furnished apartments, a dining area, good recreation facilities and nice gardens -- Highpoint Shopping Centre was a short walk away.
Unattached and separated minors lived in a separate (but perfectly open) section where they could get additional pastoral care 24 hours a day from live-in staff.
The settlement centre had strong links with the newly-established Foundation for Survivors of Torture and Trauma and to some extent had a shared staff.
Throughout the years of its existence the Maribyrnong Settlement Centre took many different forms, but for most of the time it was a place for immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers to settle into comfortable furnished apartments when they first arrived in the country. Passport and visa questions were handled on campus, the medical centre did all the screenings for illnesses, and everyone (except those in the detention centre for visa violations) was free to come and go without hindrance. It is ironical that the only vestige of the complex now remaining is the detention centre.
Some families were more than keen to leave the settlement centre and get out into the community, either into the transitional flats provided by the Immigration Department and dotted around the city, or into accommodation arranged for them by family members, ethnic communities, the Ministry of Housing or other contacts. Others found it a settling and calming experience to stay in the reception centre for a year or longer, so each morning quite a few residents left the precinct to go to work. As I recall, those wishing to stay a year or longer had to reapply each six months.
The on-campus services were available to all eligible people, whether they lived on site or not; so the settlement centre became a very valuable and very busy conglomeration of the full range of on-arrival services. People came from miles around to see a settlement officer, negotiate housing and employment, see friends and, of course, to go to school.
A strong ongoing theme was the provision of a comprehensive on-arrival education program for all school-aged children, English language classes for adults, and child-care and (eventually) pre-school programs for younger children.
The school was operated as two side-by-side institutions, one for children and one for adults. Primary and secondary-aged children enjoyed a varied school program provided by qualified primary and secondary teachers and bilingual teacher-aides. Most teachers were also qualified in the teaching of English as a second language (TESL), and many teachers were bilingual too and/or had special skills in the teaching of preliterate children.
Class sizes were to be not above 12 in secondary and not above 15 in primary. Some students with special needs worked in rather smaller groups. The adults attended English-language courses of varying lengths, provided free to all in the AMES part of the complex and conducted by trained adult ESL teachers.
Because of this juxtaposition of adult and child programs the potentially terrifying experience of entering a foreign school environment with no language to protect oneself was greatly ameliorated by having Mum and Dad and other trusted adults right next door and literally in the playground during recess and lunch breaks. (Yard duty was a dream!)
The program provided for school-age children had a strong transitional emphasis. There were many excursions right from the start, and a lot of exchange activities of various kinds between the language centre and local mainstream schools. All secondary-age students studied a variety of subjects and were introduced to school routines, texts and concepts they would meet when they transferred to mainstream schooling. Naturally the subject lessons were sometimes virtually language lessons in themselves, following the 'language in context' model, which offers both a suitable language-learning environment and a preparation for return to a full school program.
Some lucky Vietnamese and Spanish-speaking students enjoyed an extensive bilingual program including the learning of some subjects in their first language. It would have been great to make that facility available to all, but staffing proved difficult. The language centre, however, had quite a good collection of suitable books in appropriate languages.
The language centre had strong links with several local primary and secondary schools, and each term students assessed as soon-to-be ready for transfer to a local school (or who were super-eager to make the transfer) were introduced to their new schools and new teachers well in advance of the move taking place.
The farewell party at the end of each term was always a very happy-cum-tearful affair.
Now, how do you provide all that behind razor wire in the desert?
Robert Walker (former teacher-in-charge, Midway English Language Centre)
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