Forty per cent of primary age children in London now speak a language other than English at home
Schools are struggling to cover the cost of providing specialist teachers for thousands of new immigrant pupils, headteachers warned today.
Forty per cent of primary age children in London now speak a language other than English at home and some schools take several new arrivals a week as pupils “appear from nowhere”, heads have said.
The National Association of Head Teachers called for schools to be given the “infrastructureî they needed to get pupils whose first language is not English fluent enough to cope with the national curriculum as soon as possible.
The NAHT warned that the Government’s Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant, which is doled out by Whitehall to town halls to allocate among schools according to need, was failing to cover the cost of English as an Additional Language teachers. NAHT leader Mick Brookes said: “These children are welcome in our schools but we need the capacity to look after them properly.”
Latest government figures show that the capital’s primary schools alone took in more than 197,000 children for whom English is not their first language this year, up from just over 190,000 last year. Secondary schools’ proportion of nonnative English speakers rose from 33.5 per cent to 35.3 per cent.
Most are concentrated in inner London – in Tower Hamlets, three quarters of children in primary schools are now not native English speakers.