Aussie primary school snubbed by parents because of migrant, refugee students

An Australian primary school has been snubbed by local parents because most of its students are the children of migrants and refugees, according to the Melbourne school's principal.

Debney Meadows Primary School, which backs onto a public housing facility in the inner suburb of Flemington, has just 90 registered students.

Vicki Watson, principal of the public school, said very few of the Debney Meadows students came from outside of the adjacent housing estate, with the majority of local parents choosing to school their children outside of the area altogether.

"Either because of history or perceptions, often children (who live elsewhere in Flemington) have walked past this school and found themselves accepted by surrounding public schools," Watson told the Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC) on Friday.

At the nearby Flemington Primary School, 40 percent of its 475 students are classed in the most disadvantaged quarter of Australian society.

Experts have coined the parental behavior as "white flight", saying the pattern is mimicked across Australia's other inner-city housing commission areas.

Watson, who has only been in the role for 12 months, said she had fostered sweeping changes at the school in an attempt to attract new students, repainting classrooms, introducing new uniforms and providing a free laptop for all pupils.

"But on top of that, our students are learning Chinese Mandarin and they now know seven songs ... and they can also count to 100," Watson said.

Education expert Richard Teese, a Professor at the University of Melbourne, said student segregation was unproductive, and needed to be weeded out before some of Australia's schools became "ghettos".

"There's a really distinct risk we will create ghettoes and it flies in the face of our historical mission of public schooling, which is an all-in institution in which we learn from each other and support each other," Tesse told the ABC on Friday.

Tesse said parents were avoiding multicultural schools, like Debney Meadows, based on the assumption that their children would not be as "stimulated" due being surrounded by an environment with lower expectations

"That's not necessarily based on any valid or reliable information about what the school offers, but more a kind of 'herd instinct' that says it can't be right if it's local or especially if it's serving a housing commission area," he said. Endit