ABSTRACT
Leaving aside, for reasons of complexity, a discussion of the education of indigenous communities, the main vehicle for government policy on minority education in Australia is funding for schools and educational institutions. Australia illustrates well the demographic trends of a country with a large and diverse immigrant community, many of whom have strong and distinct cultural and ethnic identities (Khoo and Lucas, 2004). Over the past decade there has been a significant shift in the policy of the federal government in providing funds for ethnic or culturally specific schools. Prior to this all levels of government provided limited funding on the basis of individual community application (Lo Bianco and Wickert, 2001). Support of school initiatives by regional authorities and state governments, is still much harder to obtain (Kalantzis et al., 1989). Prior to 1996, in order to qualify for federal government school funding, any group had to meet a variety of selection criteria (National Board of Employment Education and Training, 1995ab). Perhaps the most strident of these required a community to demonstrate that it could sustain an educational initiative for a number of years prior to receiving federal aid. This made it difficult for small communities to begin a school or cultural education center as the initiative had to be self-funding in the early years. As a result, the majority of groups that established educational
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receiving governmental support. With a change in the federal government in the mid-1990s, in 1996 there was a shift in policy designed initially to favor groups who wished to establish schools outside of the major existing educational infrastructure. This shift reflected the government’s ideological interest in so-called small government and giving individuals choice over how their children were educated at the expense of the state-sponsored schools system. Most of these funds have gone to groups, such as evangelical Christians, which, while maintaining a distinctive educational philosophy, do not claim to be cultural or ethnically distinctive. However, many of the groups that have taken up the offer of federal support have been groups that are interested in preserving a distinctive cultural and ethnic identity. Coptic Christians, the subject of this chapter, have, for example, established five schools in Australia, with plans for a sixth. The Coptic community is large enough to attract funding and has the social and human resources to sustain schools on an ongoing basis. Since 2005, over thirty schools have been established for the education of cultural or ethnic minorities. The majority of these schools have been Islamic schools, but these can reflect an ethnic bias, with different schools established by different ethnic communities such as Turkish or Lebanese groups.
