The focus of this paper are bilingual primary school programs in government schools in Australia that provide credentials across two nation-states, in particular through the practice of merging two national curriculum requirements. The establishment of these bilingual merged curriculum programs is largely driven by mobile communities, often skilled global workers, whose stay in Australia might not be permanent. The formal arrangements to merge two curricula (for example in several Australian government schools with French bilingual CLIL/Immersion programs) will be contrasted with incidents of informal curriculum merging, for example in Japanese bilingual programs which use Japanese literacy and numeracy tools and approaches. Bilingual education in modern languages takes places in approximately 40 schools across Australia. These programs offer 30-50% (and sometimes even more) of mainstream curriculum delivered in a language other than English in government or independent schools. Programs are founded for a variety of reasons and are supported by different demographic actors aspiring to varied goals, such as second language learning, language maintenance, soft-power diplomacy, and merged credentials. Most of these bilingual programs use CLIL or immersion methodologies, often combined. Based on ten years of research involving school leaders, teachers, parents and students, this paper provides an overview of existing programs in Australia, with a focus on two aspects in particular: 1) the structure and approach of formal merged curriculum programs that aim to provide credentials across two nation-states, including Anglophone Australia, and programs which informally take a similar role of providing education to “global nomads”, and 2) biliteracy and binumeracy approaches in primary years bilingual French and Japanese education programs, and their relevance to merged curriculum or cross-nation curricular approaches. The paper analyses the role of CLIL as a content-based methodology in times of increasing linguistic and cultural diversity in classrooms and provides new insights into the affordances of CLIL pedagogy as a motivator for diverse language learners/language maintainers. Bilingual education here takes on a different, more diversified role from either the English language learner (ELL) focus prevalent in the USA, the second language learner (SLL) focus in, for example, most CLIL programs in Germany, and the traditional association in Australia of bilingual education with indigenous language programs. Contemporary bilingual education in Australia, with its formal and informal practices of merging curricula, offers a combination of SLL and language maintenance. Future research needs to investigate its role in supporting ELLs beyond home language maintenance.

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