Economic Social
Independence for the Vietnamese
Public Awareness
Education/ Language
result if the Vietnamese population becomes concentrated in only one or two cities.
10. In the following paragraphs we summarise what we have sought to achieve and have achieved over the period.
11. During the reception phase of the programme we thought it wise to avoid too much publicity about the number of refugees arriving here and the difficulties which there would be in settling them. To do otherwise might have led to hostile reaction and increased the reluctance of local authorities to receive the refugees. But the very success of that policy means that we have had to put in a special effort now to ensure that Vietnamese needs are not overlooked. We believe we have been successful throughout this year in obtaining a general public sympathy for the Vietnamese through our access to the media - television, radio and the press nationally, regionally and locally. Such comment and conclusions as these efforts have drawn suggest that there is public acceptance of the need for and appropriateness of the funding which government has made available for our work. This contrasts with experience in other parts of the world where public acceptance of the Vietnamese refugees has diminished.
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12. The agencies have also undertaken or prompted a series of conferences around the country, aimed at a more particular audience local councillors and officials have attended with teachers, employers, CRC officials, members of other voluntary organisations, interested members of the public and the refugees themselves to explain the Vietnamese point of view and to establish a machinery for communication about ways of overcoming their problems. We attach particular importance to this kind of activity, the object of which is to harness the energies of the extensive network of statutory and voluntary social agencies in the interests of the Vietnamese.
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13. Children, certainly younger children, are generally held to have picked up the language and to be progressing through the school system.
There are examples which can be quoted of singular academic achievement, and several Vietnamese have progressed to University. There are however problems of stress in the children which the agencies' fieldworkers observe and at least two specific areas of difficulty which have emerged and on which the agencies propose to approach the Department of Education and Science the use of remedial classes to bring on children with language problems where the more normal processes of education leave Vietnamese children under achieving; and the problems of children who arrive in the country with only a year or two of statutory entitlement to education so that they leave school with a bare minimum of English.
14. It is among the teenagers and the adults, however, that there are major problems. We quoted the low level of language ability in the introduction to our report. The damage which this inability to communicate must cause to the individual and to his ability to find employment cannot be overstressed. In urban areas the Vietnamese are generally able to plug into services which are available through ESL, EFL and adult literacy courses, though women and others left at home, and travel to and from classes, represent problems. It is in isolated, more rural areas of settlement with perhaps less tradition of adult language education that the Vietnamese are at a particular disadvantage; there may be little or nothing available locally
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