No school classes for asylum children

MORE than 230 asylum-seeker children detained indefinitely on Christmas Island will not go to school, but will have lessons using contractors.

MORE than 230 asylum-seeker children detained indefinitely on Christmas Island will not go to school on the Australian territory, but will have lessons at or near their compounds using contractors with qualifications in teaching English to foreigners.

For weeks, officials have been contemplating the logistics of sending the children to the local school, just as previous asylum-seeker children have been.

The schooling of asylum-seeker children is one of the most important issues for human-rights groups and created difficulties for the Labor government. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises the right to education for all children.

Enrolling all school-aged children in limbo on Christmas Island would double the size of its school, which has 251 students. The government estimates it would need to bring 10 extra teachers and 10 extra teachers' aides to the island to instruct the students, adding to the housing crisis. "Teachers, nurses and police all get a house as a condition of their employment here and we literally do not have 20 spare houses," a resident said. "We have no spare houses."

Sources told The Australian the Department of Immigration and Border Protection was preparing to use contractor Maximus to give children lessons. Already, Maximus Solutions provides education to the oldest teenaged asylum-seekers who arrive without parents or guardians. Under the proposal, the firm would hire workers who have gained a qualification in teaching English to speakers of other languages, a course that can take four weeks.

The indefinitely detained children are among 2000 asylum-seekers the Abbott government has said will never be sent to the mainland but who cannot go to Manus Island or Nauru because of capacity issues. In total, there are 400 children in the group and almost 240 of them are school-age. They all arrived in the period between Kevin Rudd's announcement on July 19 that no boatpeople would be settled in Australia, and the election.

Sophie Peer, campaign director of child refugee advocacy group ChilOut, said the situation for the children was appalling.

"We say the children have to be outside the detention environment, they need to go to a purpose-built proper school and as much as possible we would want them to be interacting with the wider community," she said.

A spokesman for Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said last night the government was "still working through issues of delivering additional education services to children in the detention population while at the same time maintaining the quality of education provided to the resident population".