Melbourne's schools are betting big on multilingual learning — and the data puts it ahead of London and Toronto

Victoria's Department of Education confirmed this week that 47 percent of students enrolled in Melbourne's government primary schools speak a language other than English at home — a figure that has risen by nine percentage points since 2019 and now outstrips comparable rates in Toronto's public board (41 percent) and Greater London's state sector (38 percent). The question education administrators are wrestling with: does Melbourne's infrastructure actually match that demographic reality, or is the city coasting on a reputation it built a decade ago?

The timing matters. Federal funding negotiations under the updated National School Resource Standard are due to conclude by September 2026, and Victoria is lobbying Canberra for an additional $340 million specifically tied to English as an Additional Language programs. How convincingly the state can argue its existing model works — compared with what peer cities are doing — will shape that outcome directly.

What Melbourne is doing differently

The centrepiece of the state's approach is the English Language Schools network, which operates nine dedicated campuses across metropolitan Melbourne, including the well-known Collingwood English Language School on Harmsworth Street and the newer Sunshine campus in the city's west, which opened its third building in February 2026 to handle enrolment pressure from the Brimbank corridor. Students newly arrived from countries including South Sudan, Afghanistan and Myanmar spend up to two years in intensive English immersion before transitioning into mainstream government schools. London runs a broadly similar model through its English as an Additional Language service, but its funding per student sits at the equivalent of roughly A$8,200 annually. Victoria's equivalent figure, per the department's 2025–26 budget submission, is $11,450.

Toronto uses a different architecture entirely. The Toronto District School Board embeds settlement workers and language coaches directly inside neighbourhood schools rather than operating separate campuses, arguing that segregating newly arrived students — even temporarily — slows social integration. Melbourne researchers at the University of Melbourne's Graduate School of Education published findings in May 2026 suggesting the dedicated-campus model produces stronger literacy outcomes at the Year 3 NAPLAN benchmark, but that the integration gap — how quickly students build friendships and extracurricular participation in their permanent schools — favours the Toronto embed model by a statistically significant margin.

The gap nobody wants to talk about

Strip away the program names and the picture gets less flattering. NAPLAN 2025 results showed that students in Victoria who arrived in Australia within the previous three years scored, on average, 87 points below the national mean in Year 5 numeracy. That gap has not narrowed since 2022 despite the additional campus capacity. In Amsterdam, where the municipality restructured its newcomer-student program in 2023 to include mandatory parental Dutch-language sessions alongside children's classes, the equivalent gap closed by 22 points over two years.

Brunswick Secondary College and Dandenong's Padua College — two Melbourne schools with some of the highest proportions of recently arrived students in the state — have both trialled family literacy evenings this year, modelled loosely on the Amsterdam approach, though without centralised department funding. Principals at both schools have submitted proposals to the Department of Education's Innovation Fund, with decisions expected in August 2026.

University of Melbourne researchers are also watching what Singapore does with its Compulsory Education Act, which requires bilingual schooling from Primary 1. Melbourne can't and wouldn't replicate that top-down mandate, but some academics argue the principle — treat home languages as assets rather than obstacles — is portable.

For families navigating enrolment decisions right now, the practical reality is that waitlists at the Collingwood and Sunshine English Language School campuses are running at eight to twelve weeks. The department advises new arrivals to contact their regional office — for the inner north, that is the North Eastern Victoria Region office in Carlton — immediately upon receiving a visa, rather than waiting until a family has settled into permanent housing. The gap between knowing that advice exists and it reaching the families who need it most is, arguably, the city's real education problem in 2026.