There has been concern in the Japanese community for NSW's system on exams and language education, which is considered to be "unfair" to students who have an Asian background.
In the audio, Ms Noriko Shimada, a former chairman of , explains the current situation in schools in NSW and what they have been trying to change.
According to Ms Shimada, some students with less proficiency in Japanese were not allowed to take a course they wanted to take, only because one of their parents are Japanese. "Every child is different. You can't assume having a parent who speaks the language guarantees that the child has a high proficiency in the language", Ms. Shimada says.
In another case, a student has a Japanese mother but didn't study Japanese at home or at school until Year 10. The student was not allowed to take Japanese continuer/extension course.
According to the latest Census, the fastest growing group of Japanese immigrants are Japanese females with non-Japanese partners. Those families tend to speak English at home.
HSC Japanese Committee was established in 2007 to encourage the study of HSC Japanese and abolish NSW's strict eligibility criteria for students who want to learn the four Asian languages including Japanese, which they find discriminatory and that brings disadvantages to HSC results for the students who choose the languages.
NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) told SBS Japanese:
"NSW offers the in-context and literature courses for Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese and Korean as part of targeted funding from the National Asian Languages and Studies in School Program (NALSSP)"
And "these courses provide all students, regardless of background, with the opportunity to learn these languages at the highest level they are capable of."
