A child from an English-medium school in India is barred from NSW new arrivals English support

A nine year old arrives in Sydney from Pune in March. She has been taught in English since kindergarten, at a school where the medium of instruction is English and the language of the playground is Marathi. She reads English well. She cannot follow a fast classroom conversation, does not know the word for anything on a canteen menu, and has never written an Australian style recount.

She is not eligible for the New Arrivals Program. Not because of an assessment of her English. Because of where she went to school.

The rule is written down, it is published, and it has no threshold. Any prior schooling in English disqualifies a child entirely.

The rule, in the department’s own words

The New Arrivals Program is the NSW Department of Education’s on-arrival intensive English support. It funds additional staffing for up to four terms in primary schools and in rural and regional secondary schools.

Its operational guidelines list what a student must have to be eligible. They must be newly arrived in Australia and speak a language other than English as their first language. They must be assessed at the Beginning or Emerging phase of the national English as an additional language or dialect learning progression. They must have enrolled in their first Australian school within six months of arrival, or eighteen months for kindergarten. And they must hold an eligible residency or visa status.

The guidelines then list the disqualifications. Among them, a student is not eligible if the student “attended a school in which English was the main language of instruction before arrival in Australia”.

A second exclusion sits alongside it. A student is not eligible if the student “uses English as a language of communication at home”.

Neither carries a number. There is no minimum period of English-medium schooling that triggers the exclusion, and no maximum below which it does not apply. One year, five years or ten years all produce the same outcome.

For Indian families, the two exclusions frequently apply together. English-medium schooling is the norm across much of urban India, and English is commonly one of several languages used at home. A child can be caught twice over by rules written for a different situation.

What this is not

Two clarifications before anyone acts on this.

This concerns the New Arrivals Program, which is the funded staffing model for primary schools and rural and regional secondary schools. It is a separate scheme from the Intensive English Program, which operates through Intensive English Centres and the Intensive English High School for Year 6 and high school students in Sydney, Armidale and Wollongong. The New Arrivals Program guidelines say expressly that the Intensive English Program is not addressed in that document.

[Unverified] The eligibility rules for the Intensive English Program were not established and may differ. A family whose child is of high school age should ask about that program specifically rather than assuming the same exclusion applies.

What a child gets instead

Being excluded from the New Arrivals Program does not mean a school receives nothing.

The guidelines describe the program’s funding as being in addition to the English language proficiency equity loading and refugee student support funding that schools receive through their annual budget allocation. So a student identified as an English as an additional language or dialect learner may still generate the equity loading for their school.

[Unverified] Whether a child excluded by the English-medium rule still counts toward that loading, and how it is calculated, could not be established. This is the single most consequential open question in the whole subject, because it determines whether the exclusion removes dedicated support or removes all support. It is a direct question for the department, and this masthead has asked it.

The difference in practice is between a school being funded to provide intensive teaching to a specific new arrival for up to four terms, and a school receiving a general loading it may spread across many students.

Victoria decides the same case the other way

The comparison that makes this a story rather than a rule is what happens across the border.

Victoria’s English as an additional language provision policy sets out what a newly arrived student needs to attend an English language school or centre, or the virtual new arrivals program. They must hold a citizenship or visa status attracting resource package funding. They must speak a language other than English as their main language at home. They must have a level of English proficiency, determined locally by a school or English language school, that requires intensive assistance. And they must begin within six months of arrival, or eighteen months for Foundation.

There is no exclusion for prior English-medium schooling at entry. Victoria tests the child’s actual proficiency, assessed locally, rather than inferring it from where they went to school.

Victoria does use an English-medium test, but only in a different situation. Its re-enrolment rule, covering a student returning to Victoria after time away, applies where the student was not enrolled during their absence in education where English was the medium of instruction.

So the same nine year old from Pune, arriving in Melbourne rather than Sydney, is assessed. Arriving in Sydney, she is excluded before any assessment happens.

[Unverified] Queensland’s rules could not be established, because the relevant departmental policy pages returned errors. No claim is made about Queensland in either direction.

How many children this could affect

No department publishes a count of students excluded by this rule. The ceiling can be established from the arrivals data.

In 2024, 8,042 students arrived new to NSW government schools, speaking 139 languages. The largest single language group was Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, with 1,633 students, or 20.3 per cent of all new arrivals. Within that group: Hindi 271, Urdu 261, Tamil 198, Malayalam 142, Nepali 142, Sinhalese 124, Telugu 118 and Bengali 105.

So the group most likely to be affected by an English-medium schooling exclusion is also the largest group of new arrivals in the state.

There is a second filter operating before the exclusions are even reached. The New Arrivals Program requires assessment at the Beginning or Emerging phase of the national progression. In 2025, 9.7 per cent of the state’s English as an additional language or dialect learners were assessed at Beginning and 23.0 per cent at Emerging. The remaining two thirds were at Developing or Consolidating, and therefore outside the program’s proficiency threshold regardless of anything else.

Only about a third of learners clear the proficiency gate. The English-medium exclusion then removes an unknown share of those who do.

[Unverified] What that share is, for South Asian arrivals specifically, is not published. It is a freedom of information request or a question to the department, and it is the number that would show the size of this problem.

Why the rule exists, and why it may not fit

The logic is not hard to see. A rule that excludes children previously taught in English is trying to direct scarce intensive support to children with no English at all, and to avoid funding intensive teaching for children who do not need it.

That logic works cleanly where English-medium schooling means fluency. It works less well where the phrase covers an enormous range, from an elite metropolitan school where English is genuinely the working language to a school where the textbooks are in English, instruction happens largely in another language, and a child has never held an extended conversation in English.

The rule cannot distinguish between those cases, because it does not look at the child. Victoria’s version does look, and reaches its answer at the local level.

Neither approach is obviously right. A proficiency assessment costs staff time and produces inconsistent results across schools. A schooling test is cheap, consistent and blunt. What is worth saying plainly is that New South Wales has chosen the blunt one, that it applies to the largest new arrival group in the state, and that nobody appears to have examined whether it produces the right outcomes for children from Indian schools.

[Unverified] No teacher, principal, academic or parent could be found on the public record about this rule. That is a striking silence around a policy affecting the education of children in their first year in the country, and this masthead is seeking those voices directly.

What a family should do

If your child is starting school in New South Wales and their previous school in India taught in English, expect that the New Arrivals Program will not be available, and do not treat a refusal as an error.

Ask the school two specific questions instead. Whether your child has been assessed against the national English as an additional language or dialect learning progression, and at which phase. And whether the school receives an English language proficiency loading that reflects your child, and what it is being used for.

If your child is of high school age and you are in Sydney, Armidale or Wollongong, ask about the Intensive English Program separately, because it is a different scheme with its own rules.

And if you are choosing between states, understand that this is one of the several places where the same child gets a different answer depending on which border they land inside. School fees for temporary visa holders are another. The passport is national. The schooling is not.

Sources

Every date, figure and quotation in this article is drawn from the sources below. They are listed so you can check the record yourself.

• NSW Department of Education, "New Arrivals Program"
• NSW Department of Education, Equity, Multicultural and Inclusive Education, "New Arrivals Program operational guidelines"
• NSW Department of Education, "Intensive English Program"
• Victorian Department of Education, "EAL provision policy"
• Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, "English as an Additional Language or Dialect teacher resource, EAL/D learning progression"
• NSW Department of Education, Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation, "EAL/D learners in NSW Government schools, 2025"
• NSW Department of Education, Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation, "Language diversity in NSW Government schools, 2025"
• NSW Department of Education, "School budget allocation report and equity loadings"