£244MILLION - That's the staggering sum YOU pay each year to help children in British schools who cannot speak English 

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Jonathan Petre, Education Correspondent For The Mail On Sunday

Teaching children who come from immigrant families to speak English is costing the taxpayer more than £244 million a year.

The extraordinary level of funding allocated to deal with the language problem in schools emerged just days after immigration from the European Union was revealed to have reached a record high.

Department for Education figures for the current school year suggest the costs have risen by about £40 million in just three years – up from £204 million in 2011.

The money is currently allocated to schools by local authorities on the basis of the number of pupils they have with English ‘as an additional language’, with primaries in England getting £190 million in 2014-15 and secondaries £54 million.

Most of the Government’s vast expenditure goes on teachers who specialise in teaching English to foreign children, bilingual teaching assistants – and even interpreters for parents’ evenings. And increasing numbers of teachers are enrolling on courses to learn how to teach English as a foreign language, often at their own expense.

Some schools are having to offer separate classes for children who have recently arrived from abroad, which they have to attend in order to gain essential skills in oral and written English. Only later will they join classes containing fluent English-speaking pupils.

However, native English-speaking pupils are often losing out, with more time and resources allocated to pupils from immigrant families in the classroom.

Professor Alan Smithers, the director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said: ‘The teaching of English to pupils from abroad is taking up a large chunk of money at a time when expenditure on education is severely constrained, placing extra stress on our schools.’

He added: ‘This is of great concern to parents.

‘I know of parents who are so concerned about the impact of large numbers of pupils from abroad on the education of their own children that they have taken steps to move them to schools where they can concentrate on their studies without the distraction of non-native speakers.’ 

Recent figures revealed that the number of schoolchildren with English as a second language has leapt by a third in just five years, with more than 1.1 million now using another language in the home. 

And last year there were 240 schools where 90 per cent or more of pupils did not have English as their native tongue. There were also five schools where not a single child grew up learning English as their first language.

The fastest-growing languages spoken by foreign-born pupils are those from Eastern Europe. Between 2008 and 2013, the number of Eastern European pupils in England who do not speak English at home almost tripled from just over 44,000 to more than 123,000. 

The Romanian language recorded the fastest growth – 527 per cent over five years. Latvian was second, with a rise of 414 per cent, followed by Hungarian with an increase of 359 per cent and Bulgarian with a 255 per cent rise.

Polish increased by 136 per cent, but had the greatest number of speakers at 63,275. School census figures from the Department of Education show that the number of white pupils who are not British, Irish or Roma – a group who are thought to consist largely of Eastern Europeans – has risen by 72,000 between 2010 and this year, when the figure was 313,130.

Schools are already struggling to cope with the demand for places fuelled by a rising birth rate, with many having to teach their pupils in temporary classrooms or build costly extensions.

Official estimates suggest that an extra one million school places will be needed over the next decade.

The Government is already having to spend £5 billion by 2015 on increasing places to help ease the crisis.

As well as the number of families migrating to Britain, further pressure is created by the high birth rate among those families once they have moved, the Office for National Statistics has revealed.

Romanian women on average will have 2.93 children here, compared with British women who have 1.84 children on average.

A Department for Education spokesman explained that because of a change in the funding formula two years ago, money for teaching non-native English speakers is no longer strictly ring-fenced, so councils have more choice about how they are going to spend it.

But experts said that some schools had been forced to find additional money from their own budgets to cope with spiralling demands, even helping children born in Britain whose migrant families do not speak English at home.

Teaching unions said it was crucial that new arrivals in Britain learned English as quickly as possible.

A National Association of Head Teachers spokesman said: ‘Gaining a rapid understanding of English is vital to help those children integrate in the classroom so that they can learn along with their peers.

‘Children who do have English as their first language are also well served by this approach because it means that their learning isn’t compromised by classmates who are struggling long-term with the language barrier.’

Earlier this month, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith said that the character of Britain’s schools was being altered by the influx of migrant children who did not speak English.

During a radio interview, Mr Duncan Smith said that the new arrivals in many communities ‘literally change the schooling because so many people arrive not speaking English’.

 

Article references
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