ESL Needs Expanding For UK Students
In 14 council areas, more than half of primary school pupils speak other languages in the home, it was disclosed. Nationally, English is no longer the mother tongue for a record 900,000 schoolchildren, around double the number a decade ago.
London has by far the largest concentration of pupils speaking other languages. Some 77.7 per cent of pupils in Tower Hamlets, which has a large Bangladeshi population, do not speak English at home. The rate is 73.2 per cent in Newham and 69.5 per cent in Westminster.
The Government said the amount of money being spent on pupils with weak English was increasing to £206m by 2010. A DCSF spokesman said: “The fact is, being an English as an Additional Language (EAL) pupil doesn’t mean you don’t speak English. It only indicates the language to which the child was initially exposed to early on at home, irrespective of whether they speak English fluently later on.
