In 2009, the then State Minister for Education in New South Wales, Verity Firth, announced a plan to introduce bilingual education in four primary schools across the state for the National Asian Languages and Studies in School Program (NALSSP) priority languages: Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese and Korean. This paper reports on one aspect of a larger project undertaken by the researchers to examine how the schools, teachers, parents and children in the four schools experienced the implementation of this program and how they viewed the success or otherwise of the program at the end of the first two years of policy implementation. This paper focuses on reporting the perceptions of teachers (the bilingual teachers themselves, the support (classroom and assistant) teachers and senior executive teachers at each school) in relation to the implementation of this innovative and challenging model of languages education in the Australian context. The findings indicate that implementation of such programs is challenging, and that to succeed teachers need support to collaboratively plan, to develop their understandings of bilingual styles of teaching, and that a whole school approach to such a program facilitates smoother implementation.