Melbourne Graduate School of Education - Theses

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    Rhetoric and reality: the struggle to achieve school status for language centres
    Adams, John Charles ( 1988)
    The Language Centre Program (LCP) has been in existence for more than ten years. Language centres have never had formal status as schools nor as annexes of schools. As a result two major problems have emerged: first, because language centres do not have access to school councils, the usual resources which are made available to mainstream schools are denied them; and second, teachers in language centres lack a career structure comparable to that of their colleagues in mainstream schools. The Victorian Government's social justice strategy allows a focus to be placed on student outcomes. It also provides a framework within which the issue of school status for language centres in the period 1982 to 1988 is considered. There are clear contradictions between rhetoric and reality. Three different committees/working parties have addressed the issue and five key reports have been written in the six-year period. A number of factors explain why it-has been difficult to achieve school status for language centres: the volatility of the LCP itself; the dynamics of Commonwealth immigration policy; the complexity of Commonwealth-State funding arrangements; the nature, composition and outcomes of the committees/working parties which have addressed the issue; institutional inertia; and the changing attitudes expressed by interested parties. The Minister for Education's in-principle endorsement of the third report of the Working Party on Language Centre Status and a significant increase in Commonwealth per capita funding provide a note of optimism. But a clearly articulated New Arrivals Strategy Plan which translates the broad rhetoric of the State's social justice strategy into terms which are meaningful and realistic to the LCP needs to be developed