Punjabi tops the list of 240 languages spoken in
British schools with it being the first language of
102,570 (1.6 per cent) of the pupils, followed by
Urdu for 82,250 ( 1.3 per cent) students. Bengali is
the third language in the table, with 70,320 ( 1.1
per cent) pupils speaking it and Gujarati comes
fourth.
The Department for
Children, Schools and Families report said one in
eight schoolchildren does not speak English as their
first language.
In some areas of London
over 70 per cent of pupils did not have English as
their first language.
A teacher said the figures
reflected a state of a disunited nation in class
rooms. Teachers often find it difficult to cope with
the increasing number of pupils who do not
understand or speak English.
The fact that Punjabi tops
the list is not surprising as there are over 600,000
Punjabis from India and over 300,000 from Pakistan.
Urdu is spoken by most
Pakistanis, who are in total about 1.2 million.
Bengali, which holds the third position is spoken
largely by the Bangladeshi population, rather than
Bengalis from India.
According to the Department
for Children, Schools and Families statistics
815,450 schoolchildren — or 12.5 per cent — did not
speak English as their first language as of January
this year.
For primary schools, the
proportion was 14.3 per cent, or one in seven,
compared with 10.5 per cent in 2004, the year before
the European Union expansion. In secondary schools
10.6 per cent of pupils, or about 450,000, have
English as a second language.
Children with English as a
second language are a minority in around 1,300 of
the country’s 21,000 primaries and secondaries.
As a result of the variety
of languages, a few schools have launched drives to
recruit bilingual teaching assistants to help out.
But to the warning that
classes look like disunited nations, Schools
Minister Jim Knight said, “It is fatuous and
completely out of touch to claim that this is
causing rifts in classrooms.
“Schools will always have
and always will teach in English. There is record
investment going into schools, so every child gets
up to speed quickly in reading, writing and
speaking.”
