Situated at the heart of the Vietnamese district near the City Centre, the school has a variety of pupils from different countries from Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Brazil, Sudan and Russia. The pupils are mostly refugees from their respective countries or new to the country. Most of them have limited or no knowledge of English. Even though the pupils are from different parts of the world, they have (sort of) to speak English as their common language. This school usually helps pupils to brush up their English and improve their English language so that the pupils could go into the community without any fear and/or anxiety.
The classes are divided into two parts - lower primary and upper primary. They do not have any specific placing in the class as pupils are from different age groups and they mostly group together into a class. (E.g. a class with Years 1 and 2 and another class with Years 3 to 6). From what I saw, the system is a very British education system in Primary in which they have group learning and nation-wide test. One interesting thing in the school is that the teachers mostly teach vocabularies with the pupils so that they could familiarize the language through learning and guidance from the teacher.
Other than the class itself, I could see that the school has a very detailed planning on the class format, the classroom seating arrangement and the surroundings. Pupils are usually sat with mix abilities (a high able pupil with two or three less able pupil). This could promote peer learning and it is really down to the pupils’ ability to make the class a very harmonious class. The teacher even puts words to describe the word of the object as these words are daily life words and could enrich pupils’ vocabulary.
This school does many things to cater the parents. They do employ translators on occasional cases so that parents could understand the child (ren) s’ progress. The school also did many things in which could make parents comfortable and acceptable into the society. I could say that they have fulfiled the whole school approach as the school took the initiative to take the first step to approach pupils and parents.
From my experience, this school is no stranger to me as I grew up under the same environment in primary and the school background is very similar to my secondary school’s background. There are problems that are needed to encounter. As a government funded school, the government gave limited resources to improve pupils’ standard of English. Usually, the school gave six months to one year to help pupils to catch up the English they need. There are, however, some setbacks. If the pupil did not improve or was not at a certain level after a year, the government could not continue sponsoring the pupils with low ability of English. This could lead to many post-effects when the child reaches at a higher stage of schooling.
