to establish new arrangements without prospect of any funding under Government schemes. Regarding funding, the project also highlighted the complexity of funding arrangements for language training (the Home Office, Department of Employment, Department of Education and Science, Department of Environment, the European Social Fund and local authorities themselves are all sources of funding). This complexity has of itself placed considerable difficulties in the way of those who have sought to set up new arrangements locally.
52. Against this difficult background one of the project's most useful achievements was to collect and disseminate nationwide information about the cultural needs of the Vietnamese, their dispersal around the country, about the range of available funding schemes and how best they could be pursued. The project also had some success in extending the availability of language training and in improving its quality in particular areas. It achieved this directly by running training courses for those providing tuition for the Vietnamese and by organising conferences and courses which crossed local boundaries so increasing awareness of needs, good practice and the scope for doing more.
53. We believe this to have been a thoroughly worthwhile initiative and are happy to record the co-operation, indeed welcome, which it received from all quarters. We believe, however, that it has done all that a project of this type can do in providing an impetus for the provision of language training by local education authorities and local voluntary effort.
Given the many financial pressures facing local government and the other demands on their resources, we are concerned that the impetus should not now be lost. to the DES to ensure that it is not.
We look
54. There are other special problems facing those refugees who need to pursue courses of further education in order to attain academic or professional qualifications. The ruling by the DES that refugees within the meaning of the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention would in future be entitled
to the same student award benefits as home students, represents a major advance but has left a number of difficulties unresolved. Studies leading to professional requalification by refugees do not attract local education authority mandatory awards and there have been very few cases where discretionary awards have been made. There are difficulties also for the Vietnamese in obtaining any financial support through the DHSS if the course which they wish to attend takes up more than twenty-one hours per week, as is most often the case. To qualify for support they must be available for work, and the normal ruling is that on courses over twenty-one hours a person is considered not to be so available.
55. The number of Vietnamese who face these problems is comparatively small. We know of examples where local education authorities have looked favourably on applications which are made for their discretionary grants and where local offices of the Department of the Employment have adopted a realistic approach to the question of the refugees' availability for work. We can only urge that such sympathy, realism and appreciation of the refugees' needs should become more widespread.
56. We refer in our chapter on employment to the importance of the work training courses incorporating language training organised by the Manpower Services Commission. In terms of language training, however, the single most
13.