Introduction
Numbers of guest workers in Austria
Mother Tongue in Primary Schools
Mother tongue in special needs schools
Where do the foreign children come from in Austria?
In which provinces of Austria do the children with non-German mother tongue live?
Numbers of guest workers in Austria
As is generally known, 1974 and the years after were a period of economic recession. The number of guest workers, which had reached a peak of 226.000 in 1973, dropped by 40%. Whereas there was only rather slight fluctuation in the number of foreign workers, there was a dramatic increase in the total number of foreigners living in Austria as these workers had their families move to Austria too to live with them.
This development is mirrored in the number of foreign children going to Austrian schools. A look at figures from Vorarlberg can illustrate this. In 1974 there were 622 foreign children in our schools, which amounted to 2,6 % of all the children in elementary school. This unobtrusive figure increased steadily but slowly to 4,5 % in 1978; in the years following, however, it grew much faster and reached 10,7 % in 1981, and 15,3 % in 1988 - and it has been over 15% ever since.
Whereas 2,6 % is unobtrusive and does not seem to force dramatic changes or a re-orientation, 10 to 15 % definitely does. Moreover, these percentages are average figures which hide the actual state of things: foreign workers tend to live near their work places. So when you have a big factory in a small village like Brederis in Vorarlberg, you have an unproportionate number of Turkish and Yugoslavian families living in the area, and this might lead to a percentage of 45 or more of children in a primary school class being foreign. That is when you need models that work in practice. But this clearly is also the point when the tolerance of the local inhabitants is stretched to breaking point when parents ask themselves whether their children will learn enough German for competitive schools later on.
Mother Tongue in Primary Schools
In Vorarlberg, 84 % of the children have German as their mother tongue, 16% have another language.
Around 10% are Turkish. This is a sizeable amount and seems to allow clear action. But then you also have 3% Serbian, 1% Croatian, a fraction Slovene, and about 2% other languages. Whereas it used to be possible to teach Serbs, Croatians and Slovenes together before the war in Yugoslavia, they would not share a classroom now for instruction in their mother tongue.
Looking at the 16% of non-Austrian nationalities in some detail, we see a large majority of pupils with a Turkish background, the remaining 6 % are mainly divided among pupils from former Yugoslavia, some of them are children of guest workers, others of refugees from the war in Yugoslavia.
In the whole of Austria the picture is somewhat different. Children with a foreign background in our primary schools come from various countries: the most important of these European countries are shown in the chart below.
Mother tongue in special needs schools
A related aspect is disclosed when you look at mother tongues in special schools.
There only 66% have German as their mother tongue, and a high 34% have other non-German mother tongues, the largest group being Turkish with almost 27%. The reasons for this uneven distribution may be various, but one is clearly that foreign children find it hard to learn in our schools with German as the main language. A small number of pupils might find themselves in special schools for no other reason than lacking competence in German. Other factors are cultural differences, differing shared values, different family structures to name just a few. One of the main reasons, however, seems to be the background of the foreign workers, most of whom had only been offered very basic education in their home countries and are now more concerned with subsistence and the fulfilment of basic needs than with learning and "culture".
Where do the foreign
children come from in Austria? 
The largest group is Turkish, followed by Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, and Croatia. Pupils from other countries are very small minorities, which makes support very difficult and expensive to organise.
In which provinces of Austria do the children with non-German mother tongue live?
In which provinces of Austria do the children with non-German mother tongue live? The pie chart seems to give easy answers to this rather complicated question. We see an extremely high 41% for Vienna, for instance, but this figure has to be viewed and interpreted with some background knowledge not supplied in the numerical data. Whereas the percentages given are certainly correct, they do not reflect the real nature of the problem. It is true that we have a concentration of children with foreign mother tongue in our capital, but many of these present no problem of the kind we are discussing here. They are children of diplomats and businessmen from all over the world, who go to one of the English or French schools in Vienna and often are among the top performers. Looking at the percentages, for instance, the situation in Vorarlberg looks pretty easy: a mere 6% of all the foreign children in Austria attend school here. The point to be made, however, is that our province is very small and these 6% translate into 15% if related to the number of children going to primary school in Vorarlberg.
Whatever the numbers seem to say, we must take great care not to jump to conclusions so as not to get a fragmented picture of the situation. So let me formulate what seem the basic problems:
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