Some excuse....

The Daily Mail today publishes figures on the presence in junior school education of pupils whose first language is not English.

The number who normally speak a foreign language at home rose last year to 565,888, or 14.8% of the total number, that is one in seven. In 2004 the number was 452,388.

In some areas the percentage can be as high as 70%, and there are ten schools without a single pupil who has English as a first language.

These relate to primary schools, with ages 4 to 11. In secondary schools, the proportion of students who do not have English as a first language rose from 8.8% in 2004, to 10.6 last year. The situation has prompted Damien Green, shadow immigration minister, to suggests to suggest that there are probably close to to one million pupils in all schools for whom English is a second language.

(These figures reflect, whatever your view on the level of immigration, the rise in immigration from 48,000 in 1997 to 237 in 2007. Immigrants tend to be younger than the average UK population, and so more likely to have children.)

It is a great problem for schools where such pupils are, and is complicated even further when there are many foreign languages represented by the pupils. Nelson Primary School in East London, one of the largest in the country, with 900 pupils, currently has a quarter of its pupils native English speakers, while the reminder speak any of 56 foreign languages!

While it is accepted that younger children very quickly acquire significant amounts of English, perhaps helped by watching television at home, it clearly is a major problem for some schools. Basic teaching may be held up, different methods may be necessary and misunderstandings may take time to resolve.

Does this excuse the failings of primary schools to give an adequate grounding in literacy and numeracy? There is clearly a more widespread failure, with relatively few areas performing adequately.

What the figures do suggest is that the areas with high incidence of foreign language should have greater resources to support measures to deal with the problem, whether in specialised support staff or in printed materials, etc. They also suggest that the problem was caused by a failure to control immigration, and this problem must be effectively faced as well.