Western Sydney kids speaking in 60+ tongues as migrants flock to ‘world-leading’ education

New arrivals to Australia are flocking to western Sydney for a “quality, free” education they can’t get at home. The Daily Telegraph can reveal the ten schools where more than 96 per cent of students speak languages other than English.

Three in four western Sydney public school students speak a language other than English at home, while the region’s single most diverse school caters to nearly 80 different tongues.

New figures from the Department of Education reveal Western Sydney has the highest density of non-English language backgrounds – based on the language spoken either by the students, their parents or both – of any region at 73.2 per cent of enrolments, followed by southwest Sydney at 64 per cent.

Statewide, just over a third of students spoke a language other than English at home as of March 2023.

Arabic was the most common single language spoken across NSW – other than English – accounting for just over five per cent of total enrolments.

Combined, the 25 Indian languages reported – including Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Punjabi – accounted for 14 per cent of families, while Chinese languages including Mandarin and Cantonese represented 6 per cent.

The faces of Western Sydney’s school diversity: 10-year-old Canley Vale Public School students Bradley Vu, Erica Tang, Eleanor Newton and Zenith Tea. Picture: Rohan Kelly

Among the fastest growing languages since the 2022 school census were Mongolian, Pashto and Hebrew, while the number of Ukrainian students more than doubled, up 130.6 per cent.

The Daily Telegraph can also reveal there are more languages spoken among the Arthur Phillip High School community than at any other school in the state with 79, while 12 other schools have at least 60 different languages, including Liverpool Public School (71), Bardia Public School (70) and Bonnyrigg High (69).

Arthur Phillip High School in Parramatta’s city centre is officially the state’s most diverse.

Education Minister and Minister for Western Sydney Prue Car said the figures reflect growing immigration to the region, and the attraction of NSW’s “world-leading” public education system.

“People come from other countries to Australia because they can get things like the best quality education free in their suburb,” Ms Car said.

Education Minister Prue Car with Kindergarten students Izhaar So, Jackson Hang, Zoey Lo, 5 and Isabella Pollard. Canley Vale PS is one of the state's most linguistically diverse, with 98% of students from language backgrounds other than English. Picture: Rohan Kelly

“We’ve seen communities … completely change because of migration from places like the subcontinent, different parts of Asia, and it’s public education that has to respond to that the most,” she said.

“(Public education) is one of the most important things that we provide in this country, because a lot of these families come from countries where that is not at all possible.”

Students recorded by the Department as having a language background other than English (LBOTE) are defined as those who live in a home where another language apart from English is spoken by the student, parents, or other primary caregivers. Included within the group are refugee and English as an additional language/dialect (EAL/D) students, who receive specialist support.

At Canley Vale Public School in southwest Sydney 98 per cent of students are LBOTE, and are from predominantly Vietnamese, Cantonese and Khmer (Cambodian) families. In total, more than 30 languages are spoken in the school community – including 21 languages spoken among its 95 staff.

Principal Margaret Creagh is in the minority as one of the few English-only speakers at the school, but ensures her students embrace their other tongues by spending two hours each week immersed in their home language.

“There’s lots of different sprinklings of languages (among the students), so we bring them together in a multi-language group where the teacher speaks German, Serbian, Hungarian (and more),” she explained.

“I say to the kids, treasure your first language, because … I think it’s very special when you see children still communicating with their grandparents that don’t have any English, and the kids are translating and interpreting for them.”

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