Forums Forums National News School where 4/400 speak english as 1st language!

This was (correctly) raked up by Frank Field, he dug out the statistics showing that nearly half a million primary kids do not have English as their first language out of about the three million primary kids as well as many other statistics.

Labour MP Frank Field, the co-chairman of the Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration who unearthed the statistics, said: "These figures make a nonsense of the Government's aim of integration and show the very real strain that uncontrolled, large scale immigration is already placing upon our society."

not that you get english only speaking schools in europe

sits back and reads the "i'm not racist but..." blatherings of mail readers...

It didn't say they could not speak English - it was just that their first language is something else. Its not unusual for children to communicate initially in their parents own language then learn English as another language parallel to this. The press always try to manipulate situations with statistics to stir up resentment and trouble. It states that 4 pupils speak initially in English, do you not think they would want to speak the language of thier native tongue also as their second language?

It wasn't the newspapers that brought this up recently, it was Frank Field who was concerned at the cost and disruption by having significant amounts of pupils who could not speak English.

Having taught classes with non-English speaking students, it is hard work, and while the higher ability ones were not much of a problem, the lower ability pupils took a dis-ordinate amount of effort to accommodate in classes which already needed maximum effort and flow.

I also came across schools that automatically put non-English speaking pupils in lower ability classes against guidelines which suggest that they should be graded by ability ignoring the language barrier. I concurred with the guidelines.

The beauty of being an agency teacher was seeing the different effects that different methods produced across a wide range of schools.

Lol'd at this. Stuy sure does love these threads.

The word racism is quite stupid when applied to humans. According to biologists, there just isn't enough diversity among humans for us to be put into different races.

Whenever I have to fill in some stupid diversity form asking me what race I am, I just leave them blank or write in Human. Dividing people up by skin colour is also ridiculous. I'm white. My missus's skintone is very similar to mine. She's Japanese. Is she white too? Or yellow? Black?

Also, disliking Islam or Muslims isn't racist. Even by the rather silly definition of race, Islam isn't a race. It's a religion. Or fairy tale. Whatever you want to call it.

Boring, rambling rant over.

I appreciate these threads, as they do give me cause to sit back and reconsider my views.

Don't get me wrong, I won't stop my daily Daily Mail delivery just yet but there are some people on here with some opinions worth considering.

You'll be reading the Guardian or Morning Star in no time.

This was in the Daily Mail.