UK government figures show that the share of pupils speaking English as a second language has risen to a record high. More than 800,000 school children do not speak English as their first language, the BBC has reported.
According to figures recently published by the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families, 14.4 percent of pupils aged five to 11 speak languages other than English — a rise of 0.9 percentage points on 2007. This makes a total of 470,080 pupils. The number was 10.5 percent in 2004, the year before the main European Union expansion, and has almost doubled since 1997. The number of secondary school pupils who have English as a second language has risen to 354,300 — about 10.8 percent, up from 7.3 percent in 1997. This follows a significant rise in the number of school pupils from immigrant families.
British teachers warned that the soaring number of ESL (English as a Second Language) learners has huge implications for already stretched school resources and could affect the education of other pupils. They expressed worry that overall standards could suffer if they are forced to concentrate on the few struggling with English.
Jim Knight, the Minister of State for Schools and Learners, admitted that “undoubtedly there can be problems” for schools with a high concentration of pupils with a poor grasp of English. But he also added that the gap in achievement between them and English-speaking pupils has narrowed significantly in recent years.
The UK Association of Teachers and Lecturers has called for extra funding to help them cope with the numbers of pupils arriving from abroad with little or no English. It is estimated that educating a single non-English speaking pupil can cost up to ￡30,000 ($58,677) a year, and extra cash is needed in case the situation runs “out of control”.
Many Roman Catholic schools are now printing admissions forms in Polish and hiring foreign teaching assistants to cope with increasing demand for admission from eastern European families.
