Only a tiny minority of students at a public high school in western Sydney are native English speakers, and the rest need language support, a job ad has revealed.
Arthur Phillip High School in Parramatta has 1,560 students, of which 94% have “English as an additional language or dialect (representing over 40 cultures)”, according to a recruitment notice for temporary teachers posted by the NSW Department of Education.
The NSW Government defines students learning English as an additional language or dialect as “students whose first language is a language or dialect other than Standard Australian English and who require support to develop proficiency”.
The employment ad describes the school as “culturally diverse” and says temporary positions are available in areas including Japanese, Business Studies & Geography, English, Learning & Support, and Engineering Studies.
At the time of the 2021 Census the suburb of Parramatta was 24.8% Australian-born, and only 6.8% of residents had Australian ancestry. 81.3% had both parents born overseas, 35.3% had parents born in India, and 74.5% of households used a non-English language.
Arthur Phillip High School is the first public high-rise high school in NSW, with classes moved into a 65 metre tall 11-storey building in 2020.
Its Old School House, which opened in 1875 and is the oldest continuously used educational building in Sydney, is now a museum.
In 2015, an Islamic extremist Iranian-born Iraqi-Kurd student at the school, Farhad Khalil Mohammad Jabar, 15, shot and killed unarmed police accountant Curtis Cheng in a terror attack outside the NSW Police Headquarters in Parramatta before being shot dead by responding officers.
Another student at the school was arrested days later for posting offensive and threatening material supporting the shooting on Facebook.
Header image credit: Arthur Phillip High School
