In order to understand who the Fritzkidz clientele is, this chapter analyses the demographic characteristics of parents and their reasons for selecting this particular childcare programme. The first part of this chapter describes results from the questionnaire using social categorisations such as gender, age, income and education, as well as language practices and birthplace. These results show the clientele's high economic and educational standing. These parents are above the Australian average not only in regard to income and education, but also in regard to the number of bilingual families among them. However, although German-English bilingualism is the most common form of bilingualism among the Fritzkidz families, their number is surprisingly low. The second part of the chapter describes the parents' reasons for selecting Fritzkidz. The most striking finding here is parents' initial indifference towards the bilingual programme, which was shared by almost half the clientele when first selecting Fritzkidz. The language programme was only a decisive factor for the German-speaking clientele, which constitutes, as shown in the first part of this chapter, only a minority. Since parents come to develop highly positive attitudes towards the bilingual programme while enrolled at Fritzkidz, the conclusion highlights this as a reference point for policy makers and childcare providers to intervene and make bilingual education an integral part of all early childhood education.

5.1 Who Are the Fritzkidz Parents?

To analyse the make-up of the Fritzkidz clientele, different language categories were compared and contrasted, with a focus on language background and practices. However, with language policies influencing people's language behaviours, beliefs, practices and ideologies (Spolsky & Shohamy, 2000), age and place of birth are important when discussing attitudes as well. It is fair to suggest that those who grew up in Australia, for example, have been exposed to language ideologies circulating in Australia, while those raised elsewhere would have been exposed to different language ideologies.

5.1.1 Linguistic practices

In the following, languages spoken with the children are used for categorisation in order to understand everyday-life language practices between parents and their children.