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    Victoria funds 184 community language schools and Hindi does not have one of its own

    Victoria funds 184 community language schools and Hindi does not have one of its own

    The Victorian Department of Education’s current list of accredited community language schools, dated July 2025 and still the version linked from vic.gov.au after that page’s 27 March 2026 update, carries 184 school entries under 47 language headings. Hindi, which 66,930 Victorians told the 2021 Census they use at home, appears twice, and both times as half of a shared school: “Hindi / Punjabi” at VicMandali in Sunbury and “Telugu / Hindi” at the Prajna Cultural and Educational Centre in Hoppers Crossing. Malayalam, used at home by 25,342 Victorians, does not appear at all. Nor does Kannada. Telugu is in that one shared Hoppers Crossing school and nowhere else, and Gujarati has a single accredited school, at Mount Cottrell on the city’s far western edge.

    Those are the household languages of the four families this article follows, in Tarneit, Truganina, Clyde North and Wollert. What follows is a map of what each can actually get with state money, from a Saturday class for a five-year-old to a Year 12 subject that counts towards an ATAR, and where the map runs out.

    Table of Contents

    What state funding actually buys

    Victoria supports heritage-language learning through two arms. The first is the Community Language Schools Funding Program, run by the Department of Education with Community Languages Victoria as the peak body. Not-for-profit schools apply for accreditation, which the program site says “is valid for three years once CLS show evidence that they meet a range of criteria”, and accredited schools then claim per capita funding for each eligible student. The department describes the result as “over 180 currently accredited and funded community language schools” in “nearly 50 languages”. The 2025 Accreditation and Funding Guide, updated August 2025 and still the current one, sets the bar: incorporated and operating for at least 12 months, a minimum of ten school-aged students, at least 2.5 hours of face-to-face teaching a week for about 40 weeks, a program aligned to the Victorian Curriculum F-10 Languages, a lease for every campus, an emergency plan, a first aid officer and Working with Children checks for everyone involved.

    Children write in exercise books during a weekend community language class
    Victoria funds 184 community language schools and Hindi does not have one of its own 10

    The money follows the child. Eligible students are Foundation to Year 12, matched to the Victorian Student Register, and can be “Australian or New Zealand citizens, permanent residents or holders of a temporary visa”, so a family on a 482 or student visa is not shut out. The department will not fund a student for a language they are already studying at the Victorian School of Languages, or at a second community school, and payments arrive “by the end of June each year” once the previous year’s acquittal is approved. The last published rate is from a Premier’s release of Monday 10 February 2020, when the then Andrews government announced a $7.5 million boost that lifted “the amount available for each child from $215 to $245” and extended funding to preschool children who turn four by 30 April. The then Minister for Education, James Merlino, said the schools “do amazing work with some of our newest Victorians, helping them learn their mother tongue so they can better connect with their cultural background”. Enrolments were “almost 39,000 in 2019”. No Premier’s release since has announced a new figure, and the 2025 guide says only that schools “will be advised of the annual per capita grant rate prior to the commencement of each funding round”.

    The second arm is the Victorian School of Languages, a government school with 39 centres inside secondary colleges, around 50 languages and 40 courses that run to VCE. Classes are three hours a week, mostly Saturday mornings, capped at 26 students and taught by VIT-registered teachers, and any Victorian school student whose home school does not offer the language may apply. The VSL asks for a voluntary contribution of $90 for Foundation to Year 10 and $110 for VCE. Above both arms sits the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, which decides which languages have a VCE study design at all.

    A Hindi-speaking family in Tarneit

    Hindi is the second-largest South Asian language in Victoria after Punjabi, yet the accredited list gives it no school of its own. The nearest funded Hindi classroom to Tarneit is the Prajna Cultural and Educational Centre, run by JET Australia Foundation Ltd at the foundation’s community centre at 689 Tarneit Road, Hoppers Crossing, and accredited for “Telugu / Hindi”. JET Australia Foundation is a not-for-profit registered with the ACNC that describes itself as “guided by the divine inspiration of His Holiness Chinna Jeeyar Swamiji”. Its Prajna classes page lists a Saturday 4.45 to 6.15 session for “Melbourne Tarneit” but does not say which languages run there, so families should ask the school directly what the Hindi stream covers and at which year levels. The only other Hindi entry, VicMandali, teaches Hindi and Punjabi at the Dulap Wilim Hub at Sunbury Heights Primary School, in the outer north-west.

    The VSL fills much of the gap. Hindi is one of its most widely offered languages: face-to-face classes from Foundation to VCE run at Truganina and Werribee, both a short drive from Tarneit, and at Caroline Springs, Melton, Sunshine, Craigieburn, Epping, Blackburn, Berwick, Dandenong and Glen Waverley, with regional centres at Ballarat, Shepparton and Wodonga. VCE Hindi is also one of only two South Asian languages the VSL teaches by distance education. The VCAA’s Hindi study design sits within the Collaborative Curriculum and Assessment Framework for Languages, the national scheme for smaller candidatures, and the numbers are not small. In 2025, 80 students were enrolled in Unit 3 Hindi across eight providers, and 56 in Unit 1. As this magazine reported on 31 August 2026, 29 students sat Hindi Continuers in the 2025 HSC in New South Wales. A Tarneit child can therefore go from Prep to Year 12 Hindi inside the state system. What that child cannot do is attend a state-funded community school that exists for Hindi alone, the way a Punjabi child can choose from four, or a Tamil child from five schools with 18 campuses between them.

    A Telugu family in Truganina

    For Telugu, the shared Hoppers Crossing school is the whole of the funded community sector in Victoria. There is no second accredited Telugu campus anywhere in the state for a language 24,677 Victorians use at home. The VSL teaches Telugu at Werribee, and at Berwick, Glen Waverley and Ballarat, but its course table stops at Secondary; the VCE column reads “No”. That is because the VCAA has no Telugu study design, so no Victorian student can count Telugu towards a VCE or an ATAR, whatever they have learnt. A Truganina family can get a funded class for a primary-aged child a few kilometres away, and a Year 7 to 10 class at Werribee, and then nothing that carries into senior secondary.

    Parents wait outside a suburban community hall while a language class runs inside
    Victoria funds 184 community language schools and Hindi does not have one of its own 11

    The contrast in the same suburb is instructive. Hamro Barnamala, a Nepali school at the Mainview Boulevard Family Learning Centre in Truganina, joined the accredited list in 2025, giving Victoria’s 21,955 Nepali speakers their fourth funded school; NAV Bal Chautari alone runs campuses at Thomastown, Mernda, Tarneit, Taylors Lakes and South Melbourne. Nepali, too, has no VCE study and no VSL class, but its community has completed the accreditation paperwork four times over.

    A Gujarati family in Clyde North

    Clyde North sits in the City of Casey, which is well served on the list for several South Asian languages. Sankalp-Ek Nishchay teaches Marathi at the Merinda Park Learning and Community Centre in Cranbourne North. The Sikh Community Gurmat Centre teaches Punjabi at its Gurmat Academy in Devon Meadows. Bharathi Academy has a Tamil campus at Kambrya College in Berwick, and VTA Tamil School runs at Fleetwood Primary School in Narre Warren and at Doveton College. The South East Bangladeshi Cultural Foundation teaches Bangla at Brentwood Park Neighbourhood House in Berwick, and The Buddhist Vihara Victoria teaches Sinhala at its Berwick temple.

    Gujarati is not among them. The state’s only accredited Gujarati school, the Shree Swaminarayan Gurukul Language School at 1596 Boundary Road, Mount Cottrell, is new to the 2025 list and sits beyond Caroline Springs on the opposite side of the metropolitan area. The VSL offers Gujarati at exactly one centre, Werribee. The two VSL centres closest to Clyde North, Berwick and Hampton Park, list Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Sinhala and Telugu between them, but not Gujarati. And there is no VCE Gujarati study design. For a Casey family speaking a language that 24,181 Victorians use at home, the state-funded Gujarati offer is nil at every level unless the family is prepared to cross the city on a Saturday.

    A Malayalam family in Wollert

    Malayalam has more speakers in Victoria than Telugu or Gujarati, 25,342 at the 2021 Census, and not one accredited school. It is the largest language in the South Asian group with no entry on the list. What Wollert does have is the VSL centre at Epping, which teaches Malayalam alongside Hindi and Sinhala, with Malayalam also at Berwick, Croydon, Hampton Park, Taylors Lakes and Werribee and regionally at Bendigo, North Geelong, Shepparton and Wodonga. As with Telugu, the VSL course runs Foundation to Secondary and no further, and the VCAA has no Malayalam study. Kannada, with 5,660 speakers, is in the same position: no accredited school, VSL classes at Berwick, Dandenong, Glen Waverley and Point Cook, and no VCE. Wollert itself shows that a new suburb can get a school onto the list. Wollert Community Pathshala, a Bangla school at the Kirrip Community Centre, was accredited for the first time in 2025, one of seven Bangla schools now funded across the state for 15,123 speakers.

    A stack of language textbooks and a pencil case on a classroom desk
    Victoria funds 184 community language schools and Hindi does not have one of its own 12

    Temples, gurdwaras and the accreditation door

    None of this means Hindi, Telugu, Gujarati or Malayalam families are not teaching their children. Across Melbourne, classes run every weekend at temples, gurdwaras, community halls and kitchen tables without a dollar of state funding, and the list is a record of accreditation rather than of effort. The list also shows that a religious institution is no barrier to funding: the Gurudwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha in Craigieburn, the Sri Guru Nanak Satsang Sabha in Blackburn and Hoppers Crossing, the Dhammasarana Buddhist Temple in Keysborough and the Swaminarayan Gurukul at Mount Cottrell are all accredited campuses.

    The pattern in the two most recent lists is that communities which organise get funded. Between the June 2024 and July 2025 lists, six South Asian-language schools were added: Indian Cultural Education Ltd (Punjabi) at Mount Duneed, the Sikh Community Gurmat Centre (Punjabi) at Devon Meadows, the Shree Swaminarayan Gurukul (Gujarati) at Mount Cottrell, Wollert Community Pathshala and Wyndham City Bangla School (Bangla) at Wollert and Tarneit, and Hamro Barnamala (Nepali) at Truganina. None was Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam or Kannada. The program site says “the next accreditation round will open mid-2026”, and as at 17 September 2026 it still carries that sentence, the 2025 guide and a note that the previous round “has now closed”. No dates for the 2026 round have been published. The department has issued no public statement on whether any Hindi, Telugu, Gujarati or Malayalam school applied or was accredited this year, so no public position exists on that question as at 17 September 2026, and none from the VCAA on whether any further Indian language is under consideration for a VCE study.

    What the federal grants change here, and what they do not

    On 21 August 2026 the Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Dr Anne Aly, and the Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs, Julian Hill, announced grants under the Fluency in Asian Languages stream of the Community Language Schools Grants Program, administered by the Department of Home Affairs, for “languages including Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu”. Dr Aly said: “These grants will help more students continue learning Indian languages into their senior secondary years, supported by skilled teachers and high-quality resources.” Mr Hill said: “Community language schools play a vital role in helping young Australians stay connected to their heritage, strengthen intergenerational ties, and celebrate cultural identity.”

    Read the recipients. Two grants go to New South Wales Tamil bodies, the Tamil Study Centre Homebush and the NSW Federation of Tamil Schools. The Australian National University will build “Digital Language Hubs” for community language teachers “including those teaching Hindi”. The University of Sydney will “help community language schools establish Years 7-12 classes”. Victoria’s only named recipient is Community Languages Victoria Inc, “to establish an online Teachers Hub and strengthen Asian language learning from the middle years through to senior secondary school”. The release gives no amount, but CLV told its member schools on Thursday 7 May 2026 that it had secured “$440,000 in funding under the Australian Government’s Community Language Schools Grants Program” in what it called Fluency in Asian Languages Round 1, for a statewide initiative on pathways “from the middle years through to VCE”, in a notice signed by its chief operating officer, Fahry Abubaker. The federal release places all of this inside a “$25.6 million investment over four years from 2025-26” supporting “more than 90,000 students to learn more than 80 languages”, and notes an earlier round in which “85 community language schools will share more than $1.47 million over four years”, aimed at schools “that had not previously received funding”. An undated companion release on Mr Hill’s education portfolio page puts the Fluency stream at “$2.5 million of support for Asian language learning, shared between nine organisations across Victoria, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory”.

    What the money does not do is move any of the three gates described above. It does not accredit a single Victorian school; that is the department’s round. It does not alter the per capita rate. And it does not create a VCE study in Telugu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Urdu or Marathi; only the VCAA, working through the national framework, can do that. A teachers’ hub can lift the quality of a Year 9 Malayalam class at the VSL in Epping. It cannot make Year 12 Malayalam exist.

    Two windows, one this term and one already open

    The VSL’s homepage says: “Enrolments for 2026 have closed. Enrolments for 2027 will open in term 4 this year.” Term 4 runs from Monday 5 October to Friday 18 December 2026. Enrolment is online only, through a VSL Compass parent account that must be created fresh even if the family already uses Compass at another school; the parent picks a language and centre through the Language Finder and lodges the application, and existing families are told through Compass when re-enrolment opens. A child starting in Foundation must have turned five by 30 April of the enrolment year. For VCE, the VSL warns that Units 1 and 2 assume about 200 hours of prior classroom learning, which is the practical reason a funded primary-years class matters even in a language that stops at Year 10.

    The accreditation round is the other window, and it belongs to the communities themselves. A Hindi, Telugu, Gujarati or Malayalam class that has run for a year, has ten enrolled students, meets the 2.5-hour rule and can produce the documents in the 2025 guide can email the program at cls-accreditation@unimelb.edu.au to begin an eligibility check, with Community Languages Victoria as the support body. New schools are taken once a year, but new campuses of an already accredited school “may be accepted as required”, which is the mechanism behind the Tamil networks of six and nine campuses. Accreditation lasts three years and opens per capita funding for every eligible child, including children on temporary visas, and approved schools can later apply for preschool places. The two lists show the outcome for those who do the work: Punjabi went from two stand-alone accredited schools in June 2024 to four in July 2025.

    For a family in Tarneit, Truganina, Clyde North or Wollert the practical order is this: check the July 2025 list for a funded school near you, enrol at the VSL in Term 4 for anything the list does not cover, and understand that for Telugu, Gujarati and Malayalam the state pathway ends at Year 10 until the VCAA adds a study. For the volunteers running the unfunded classes, the thing to watch is the program site for the 2026 round dates, because the difference between a language with four funded schools and a language with none has so far come down to who filled in the forms.

    Sources

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