Developing innovative education support programs for refugee and newly arrived young people

Over the 2002 to 2003 year, 42% of the people who had settled in Victoria under the Australian Government’s humanitarian program (as refugees) were 18 years and younger. The following year this increased to over 50 per cent.¹

The early 2000s also saw a significant increase in new arrivals from Western, Central and Eastern African countries, and from the mid 2000s, an increase from the Middle East, South West and South East Asia. With these shifts in the background of refugee young people, came an increase in the numbers of young people who had spent a longer time in refugee camps or first countries of asylum and whose educations had been more severely interrupted than the refugee young people who had been entering Victoria during the 1990s.² By 2007, research from the Refugee Education Partnership illustrated ‘a profile of young refugee learners [in Victoria] with little or no previous formal education; who have not achieved literacy in the language of their homeland or any other language; without parental support; who have frequently experienced extreme violence.’³

It is in this context, of increasing complexity of the needs of refugee learners in Victoria, that the Refugee Education Partnership Project set about working towards a more coordinated, strategic approach to responding to the needs of refugee learners. The partnership brought together Foundation House – The Victorian Foundation for the Survivors of Torture, CMYI, the Victorian Department of Education, the Department for Victorian Communities, the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, Debney Park Secondary College and a private philanthropic trust. The project was focused on boosting support through more coordination of out of school hours support (such as through homework clubs), support for refugee students within school and cross-sectoral coordination and policy analysis.⁴ As a key partner in this project, CMYI came with a long history of research, advocacy and program work with refugee young people on the issue of education and with schools.

Already convening a network of homework support group coordinators and having developed a report on homework support and tutoring for refugee young people, CMYI took the lead in developing a model for an Out of School Hours Homework Support Program. See Statement 11 Bolstering educational support for refugee young people for further details of the statewide homework program that grew from this advocacy.