When Linda Shen's husband moved from Shanghai to Melbourne in 1989, she watched him enjoy all that life in Australia promised.
"As long as you worked diligently, you could make your life very good," she said.
She arrived in Australia herself in 1995, but her experience here has fallen short of her expectations.
Looking back on more than 20 years working as a Chinese language teacher in Victoria, Mrs Shen believes she has been taken advantage of by an unfair system that favours her employer.
"I just want the rights I deserve," she said.
She is part of a group of teachers alleging they are owed unpaid wages and entitlements due to incorrect employment categorisation, which has shed light on a "grey area" of Victoria's education system.
Those allegations are currently being investigated by the Fair Work Ombudsman and her employer has been told to get legal advice by the peak body that represents the schools, given ambiguities in the law.
Many Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) languages curriculum teachers have also been working without registration, which the Victorian Department of Education and Training (DET) has said is a breach of Victoria's education laws.
However, the organisation that represents the community schools disputes whether some of these workers are even technically "teachers" at all.
'I am passionate about teaching'
After staying silent for two years, Mrs Shen decided to share her story because she does not want this "grey area" to continue unchecked and affect more teachers.
"I think there is discrimination," she said, of the Victorian education system.
Mrs Shen started working at the Xin Jin Shan Language and Culture School (XJS) in Melbourne in 1996 and taught VCE curriculum Chinese language subjects from 2006 until 2020.
The main campus of the school, based in the south-east Melbourne suburb Mount Waverley, is one of the biggest and most successful community language schools in Victoria, with around 4,000 students.
Community language schools operate outside mainstream school hours, mostly on weekends from rented school facilities, teach languages other than English and are considered valuable cultural and community hubs.
Once they receive government accreditation, a rigorous process, the schools can offer classes to students from preschool to year 10, and some like XJS get further approval to teach year 11 and 12 VCE curriculum.
The schools are not registered schools under Victoria's Education and Training Reform Act, but they do become subject to education regulations when accredited to teach VCE subjects.
Mrs Shen said her VCE students would often get top marks and receive Premier's VCE Awards.
In 2018, three of her students got perfect scores.
"I am passionate about teaching, and I am passionate about students," Mrs Shen said.
However, Mrs Shen and several of her colleagues stopped teaching VCE curriculum in 2020 when the school told them as VCE teachers, they should have been registered with the Victorian Institute of Teaching (VIT).
It is unclear when the school first became aware that the teachers were unregistered.
Mrs Shen now works solely in a tutoring role for XJS, but said other unregistered VCE teachers who were not union members continued to work at two similar language schools.
In response to questions from the ABC about the teacher registration issue, DET responded with a statement that said: "Under the Education and Training Reform Act 2006, it is an offence for a person who is not registered, or who does not have permission to teach, to undertake the duties of a teacher."
"Schools and Community Language Schools are also under a legal obligation to ensure those undertaking the duties of a teacher in relation to VCE subjects, including languages, are registered with the Victorian Institute of Teaching," said VIT chief executive officer Peter Corcoran.
Mrs Shen was "shocked" when she found out she may have been teaching in breach of Victorian education laws.
"I want to ask why no one told us about that in the past 20 years?" she said.
'What we want is transparency'
The teacher registration issue was flagged in a 2020 Deloitte audit into XJS for DET and obtained by the ABC via Freedom of Information.
The audit report included a recommendation that any staff and volunteers lacking appropriate accreditations not be allowed to teach students.
It came after a separate 2019 HLB Mann Judd audit obtained by the ABC via a separate FOI application uncovered a list of financial mismanagement issues and called for further investigation.
While that audit found that the school was compliant on some accreditation requirements, the report made a number of adverse findings against the school, including inadequate record-keeping and transactions between related parties, creating potential conflicts of interest.
In 2020, XJS strongly denied there was any financial impropriety at the school.
XJS is a charity that had a total income of roughly $4.1 million in 2021, according to figures published by the charities regulator, which included close to $950,000 from DET.
The follow up Deloitte audit found XJS had complied with its not-for-profit status.
An ACNC spokeswoman said she was unable to comment on XJS specifically due to secrecy provisions in ACNC legislation.
"We take concerns about registered charities seriously and investigate where appropriate," she said.
In addition to its charity status, XJS is also an incorporated association.
Sunny Sun also worked as an unregistered VCE Chinese language teacher at XJS but now only tutors for the school.
His students also received top marks and Premier's VCE Awards.
Mr Sun said incorporated association rules required that the school be run as a community organisation open to members who elect school management.
"It's been more than a decade that they haven't have such operation."
"What we want is transparency. [The school has] absolutely has no transparency at all," he alleged.
XJS did not respond to the ABC's questions, however, the XJS website now has a page with a link to a form where people can apply to become members of the school.
A spokesperson for Consumer Affairs Victoria, the government authority responsible for incorporated associations, said it does not comment on individual associations, but they are required to hold annual general meetings, present financial statements and call elections.
"If a dispute cannot be resolved, members have the right to take the matter to the Magistrates Court of Victoria for a binding order," the spokesperson said.
Ongoing teacher pay battle exposes grey area
As the teachers came to understand the rules that applied to their employer, at the same time they were offered their first proper employment contracts.
Mrs Shen and other teachers said the contracts raised questions because they were mostly offers of casual work, and different contracts cited different awards, making it unclear how much they should have been paid.
The contract offers marked the beginning of a yet-unresolved set of inquiries by the teachers spanning two years to understand their employment rights.
The ABC can reveal their queries resulted in a Fair Work Ombudsman investigation into XJS, which a spokesperson said is "ongoing".
In September, the Ombudsman sent XJS a compliance notice that requires the organisation to correct underpayments by November 21.
"The award you were covered by is the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award 2010 and your employment was part-time," the ombudsman told Mrs Shen in an email seen by the ABC.
While welcoming the ombudsman's finding that her work was part-time, Mrs Shen disagreed with the award choice.
"For 20 years or more, my work has not been about providing services, it is about teaching, and educational work," she said.
The teachers alleged that during the course of their careers, they had not been paid for a lot of "invisible work" like cross-marking examinations on weekends and class preparation.
In 2006, when Mrs Shen began teaching year 12 Chinese VCE curriculum, she said she was paid $40 per hour. In 2008, her pay records showed an hourly rate of nearly $45.
Her pay increased to $80 around the time the contract dispute broke out, but her hours of work have decreased.
'You're not teachers'
XJS chairperson Haoliang Sun declined to be interviewed by the ABC or answer questions via email about the underpayment allegations.
The ABC also contacted XJS principal Kevin Hu, but he did not respond.
Stefan Romaniw OAM — executive director the national peak association that represents the schools, Community Languages Australia (CLA) — said XJS sent him the ombudsman's compliance notice and he told the school to get legal advice.
Mr Romaniw added that he had written to the federal attorney general in 2020 and also sought separate legal advice, which he described as "fluid", and said each school must decide how it classifies and pays staff, if at all.
The schools can engage people as volunteers, on an Honoria system, or have employees, but the nature of the initial agreement has to be clear from the outset, he said.
Mr Romaniw also disputed the ombudsman's determination that the teachers should be part-time employees with pay and conditions under the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award.
"First of all, if you go up that path, you will decimate community language schools," he said.
Mr Romaniw said most community language schools are volunteer-run organisations.
"There seems to be a lot of confusion about what community language schools are," he said.
"They are after-hours community language schools and are there to promote languages and cultural maintenance … that's why they're not registered schools under the Education Act.
"The Education Act requires you to deliver more than one subject and you need to have your own premises."
Mr Romaniw did acknowledge the work of the VCE teachers was a "different ballgame", and likened that work to an "instructor" role, but did not elaborate on what that meant for the teachers' employment rights.
"If something has to be mandated, if something has to be made an award, then you need to create an award that reflects what the industry is," he added.
"This one scenario that we have ended up with, all of a sudden, with people saying 'we have to do this we have to do that' therefore we are now teachers.
"In actual fact, you're not teachers."
A DET spokesperson said the department is aware of the ongoing discussions about remuneration of staff at community language schools, "which should be considered through relevant industrial laws".
"Teachers and those who volunteer in community language schools play a vital role in helping children and young people to learn and connect with their heritage languages."
More unregistered VCE language teachers identified
The ABC can reveal that unregistered VCE language teachers have been working at other community language schools.
Fahry Abubaker, Community Languages Australia executive officer, said the unregistered teachers had been discovered by a Victorian government statutory authority in applications the schools recently made to teach VCE languages in 2023, as single study learning providers.
"One of the findings that was picked up by VCAA (Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority), is that some of the VCE teachers are not VIT teachers," he said.
"It's actually a few schools that reported that."
Mr Abubaker said CLA had been under the impression that only the VCE coordinators at community language schools had to be VIT registered teachers.
"The VCAA have sort of put this aside at this stage just to sort of sort out what's happening.
"But we probably will need to sit down with them and feel the way out of this. Because if this is the case, then yeah, we're going to have a problem."
However, the Department of Education and Training continues to stand by its accreditation process.
"We have rigorous accreditation processes for those seeking to run a community language school and additional requirements for those community language schools seeking to teach VCE Languages," a department spokesperson said.
Experts call for support for teachers
Ken Cruickshank, a professor at the University of Sydney and director of the Sydney Institute for Community Language Education, called on the government to take responsibility for teachers.
"There is a national teacher shortage crisis. They should have helped these teachers gain accreditation and not now throw them under the bus," he said.
Professor Cruickshank said teachers at community languages schools are a "hidden and untapped resource".
In New South Wales, he has led the creation of a Master of Teaching run at Western Sydney University and ACU Blacktown, to help migrants and overseas trained teachers become fully accredited.
"We had about 20 graduates [recently], one of them got the Dean's Medal, and they're all on the Dean's merit list," he said.
"So once these teachers who need to upgrade get into these courses, they do wonderfully, they just need the support and the information."
Deb James, general secretary of the Independent Education Union Victoria Tasmania, said it is vital that overseas-qualified teachers are properly supported.
"Employers must be held responsible for ensuring that they are aware of and are able to meet local registration requirements," she said.
Dr Yvette Slaughter, from the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne, said the recognition of teacher training qualifications by VIT for teachers trained overseas "has been a significant challenge for languages education for decades".
Dr Slaughter said the majority of language teachers come from non-English speaking countries and are required to do a teacher training course in Australia to be registered to teach in Victorian schools.
"We have fantastic teachers trained overseas, including those who come here as sponsored language assistants, who are given permission to teach from VIT with support from individual schools, but this is a temporary measure," she said.
"Ultimately, they need to do a two-year post-graduate degree to continue teaching in schools.
"Many people simply cannot afford the fees nor to study full time for two years."
This was the case for both Mrs Shen and Mr Sun, who both said they needed to prioritise work over study when they moved to Australia in the 1990s to build a life for their children.
"With family, work, coupled with our English level it is difficult. I haven't been able to take [the time] to complete a degree," Mr Sun said.
English was also a barrier for Mrs Shen, who worked as a qualified teacher in Shanghai before coming to Australia.
"Because I was studying during the Cultural Revolution [in China], I basically didn't have an English education, so my English was very poor," she said.
Dr Slaughter suggested scholarships for overseas trained teachers so they can undertake teacher training, or scholarships for internships so teachers can work in schools while they study, and the development of shorter courses.
Mr Romaniw said CLA had also been considering solutions to the registration issue, including a course that was linked to registration in Victoria.
In Victoria, there several training courses community language school teachers can take but those courses are not linked to registration pathways.
In South Australia, a course was created specifically for teachers at community language schools who were not mainstream schoolteachers to become accredited to teach the South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE).
Mrs Shen said she would like to get back to teaching VCE curriculum classes for XJS.
"The parents here, the teachers here, the classmates here, are my best friends and assets," she said.
"And I don't want them to think I'm running away with my tail between my legs."
