Bilingual Education

PYEC want to take a leading role in developing and actualising bilingual education in the APY lands.

Anangu have identified that one of the reasons their children don’t like going to school is because they don’t understand what is going on in the classroom and lessons are not relevant to the world they live in outside the schoolyard.

Schools have limited first language resources for use in schools that meet Bilingual Education resource standards and teachers (Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal) are not sufficiently trained in how to teach in multilingual classrooms. This project will focus on addressing some of the needs for teachers and schools in supporting a fully Bilingual education program across all Anangu schools.

Phase one of this project has been supported with funding from National Indigenous Australians Agency. It provides PYEC with some funding to conduct an audit of Bilingual resources, digitise them and make them available for teachers across the lands. It will also allow for the commencement of story development in each of the Anangu school communities.