Refugee literacy funding to stay

26 November 2009 (Nelson Evening Mail)
The Tertiary Education Commission has agreed to continue funding Victory Primary School's basic literacy programme for refugees.

The school has provided literacy and numeracy courses to 22 refugees each year for the past nine years.

They are mainly young women with children, who attend classes three times a week.

The commission initially left the school with only $11,000 to run the courses, down from $58,000 in previous years, which would probably have led to the programme being scrapped.

The commission advised the school to apply for funding for next year's courses from a $2.8 million adult and community education (ACE) fund, however Victory Primary School principal Mark Brown said $11,000 would not be nearly enough to cater for the people who needed the courses.

However, he recently received confirmation that the commission would fund the courses for the next two years at the previous amount.

"It's brilliant, it's fantastic, because we know it is very successful and I think reason has prevailed," he said.

"[The commission] has come round to it."

Tertiary Education Commission director of com-munity education Pauline Barnes said the reason for the shift was that the school initially applied for 100 places for school-based ACE funding in 2010. However, the criteria for funding stated that a minimum of 400 places would need to be offered.

"As there was a regional need for literacy and numeracy, the commission approached Victory and discussed with them if they could either teach the additional places, or work with other schools to do this."

Following these discussions, Ms Barnes said the school agreed to an allocation of 500 learner places for 2010.

Mr Brown said the school was still negotiating with the commission on how the service would be provided but there would probably be no change from before.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/nelson-mail/news/3099644/Refugee-literacy-funding-to-stay