Hosting community language schools in NSW: a relational composite case study

This paper examines how hosting arrangements between mainstream schools and community language schools in New South Wales are produced and sustained through everyday boundary work. Drawing on a relational composite case of a high functioning hosting relationship, the study uses street level bureaucracy and boundary work to move beyond individualised accounts of supportive or unsupportive leadership. Findings show that hosting becomes possible, and sometimes durable, because boundaries around space, legitimacy, and authority are actively produced, aligned, and stabilised in practice. What distinguished more workable arrangements was not the absence of asymmetry, but the extent to which boundary regimes reduced uncertainty about access, responsibility, communication, and decision making. Boundaries frequently interlocked, shaping both participation in mainstream school spaces and the security of that participation. The paper concludes that improving hosting requires structural supports that stabilise access and decision making over time, reducing reliance on local discretion and uneven boundary regimes.