As schools wind down for 2025 and year 12 students begin their transition to "adult life", as my daughters call it, I'm also reaching the end of my journey as a parent in the ACT public school system. It's been 16 years since I dropped my first-born off for his first day of school. And it's been 16 years of fighting for my children's right to study an Asian language, or really, any language other than English (LOTE), at school.

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In the nation's capital, home to countless embassies, cultural missions and internationally facing government departments and private sector businesses, our public school students have almost no pathways to learning a LOTE from primary school, or even secondary school, through to college.

In my own childhood, growing up in regional Victoria in the '80s and '90s, Indonesian was offered at four of the five schools I attended over 13 years. In 1990, 90,000 kids were studying Indonesian in schools across Australia. By 2000 that number was well over 300,000. My classmates from Indonesian language courses at ANU - the program I teach today - now occupy positions across the public and private sector, leading our bilateral relations with Indonesia and, in our universities, training the next generation.

When my eldest began school around 2010, I quickly realised he would not have the same opportunities. We joined the local community Indonesian language school, and set up an after-school language club at our school. I quit my job, started a PhD and dragged the family to Indonesia for fieldwork so I could enrol the kids in local schools for a couple of years.

My kids' next Australian primary school offered Indonesian, but even though there were many Indonesian kids at the school, for most of their time there all students studied the same material every year.

Foreign languages were not offered at our zoned public high school, so we sought the education directorate's permission to enrol in an out-of-zone school that offered French and Mandarin. Last year, when Indonesian suddenly became available at a nearby, non-feeder college, I wrote again to the directorate for out-of-zone enrolment........

© Canberra Times