The current national higher education definition used for non-English speaking background is the other equity definition about which there is concern. The main criticism is that it misses many students whose cultural and language backgrounds have implications for their studies, based as it is on satisfying three fairly stringent indicators.127 Using the national definition, there were no students of non-English speaking backgrounds amongst the 2002 UniSA-PAL students at Para West, although the school’s data indicated that nearly 9 per cent actually spoke a language other than English at home. While just over 3 per cent of the 2002 commencing students in the Diploma in University Studies met the national definition of students from a non-English speaking background, 10 per cent spoke a language other than English at home. Similarly while it seems that none of the 2003 PAL students in the four adult re-entry schools met the national definition, 9.6 per cent spoke a language other than English at home, most of these being at Marden.
The countries of birth of the PAL students across all four schools and both years (2002 and 2003) included Papua New Guinea, Switzerland, Sri Lanka, the Sudan and Zimbabwe, as well as New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The absence of any overseas born students in the small cohort at Thebarton is surprising since the school has a high number of students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds in the wider student body. If the school continues to offer the PAL course in the future, this aspect of Thebarton’s intake should be monitored. In comparison 2 per cent of the group of students undertaking enabling programs across Australia in 1999 were from non-English speaking backgrounds.