ABSTRACT
The thrust of child migrant education has been and is the same—but a continuing accumulation of challenges, from a variety of sources, to English-language-dominated approaches received the blessing of the Schools Commission in 1975. The themes that dominated teachers’ thinking about migrant education up to the mid-sixties were clearly stated in 1951 in an article by J. B. Cox, headmaster of a primary school in a migrant holding centre. The earliest record of a request for special teachers is contained in a letter written in 1954 from the Victorian Teachers’ Union to the Victorian Department of Education. To educational administrators, the significance of the influx of migrant children lay all in the additional numbers they contributed to total enrolments and to the size of the handicapped or slow-learner segment of the school population in particular. The only State to attempt any systematic approach to the education of non-English-speaking migrant children during the fifties was South Australia.
