ESL Students Experience Sats Success
Children from ethnic minority backgrounds are overcoming cultural and language barriers to achieve outstanding results, figures showed today. Forty per cent of London’s 81,000 primary school pupils who took Sats last year did not speak English as their first language.
Yet the vast majority went on to pass their tests in English, with girls in this group achieving better results than the average for all pupils in the capital. Children from Chinese and Indian backgrounds in particular achieved a high proportion of top grades, while headteachers paid tribute to the work ethic of many families recently arrived from eastern Europe. At Nelson Primary School in East Ham, pupils speak 53 different languages. For three-quarters of children at the school, their first language is not English. click here for article
