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Punjabi Is Now Second Highest Spoken Language In British Schools
THE NEWS
London, England
The number of children who count English as their mother tongue are now in the minority at more than 1,600 schools across England. Punjabi is the most frequently spoken language among pupils who do not have English as a first language.
Official figures released by the Department of Education show that close to one million children who now attend schools in England do not have English as their first language at home.
The amount of schools with a majority of pupils who do not class English at their home language is steadily increasing by one a week. Classrooms across Britain are becoming more multicultural with one in six youngsters in Primary Schools not having English as a first language.
There are 97 schools where children with English as their first language are in such a minority that they make up less than one in twenty pupils.The Department of Education statistics show that in 1997, when Tony Blair first came to power, there were 866 schools in England where more than 50 per cent of the pupils had English as a second language.
Now there are 1,363 primary schools, 224 secondary schools and 51 special schools where more than half the pupils come from a non-English speaking background.London has the highest concentration of schools with a majority of pupils who do not have English as their first language at home. Across the 14 boroughs that make up Inner London, there are 98,000 schoolchildren whose first language is not English, compared to just 79,000 native English speakers.
Within the London boroughs, Newham, where thousands of Sikh, Pakistani and Indian families live, had the highest amount with 79 schools, followed by Tower Hamlets with 70, where majority Bangladeshis live, Brent with 57 and Ealing with 55 schools, where Sikhs and Pakistani live.
London was followed by Birmingham with 117 schools where the majority of pupils do not have English as their mother tongue. Bradford came next with 59 schools followed by Leicester with 40 schools. Manchester has 35 schools, while Lancashire has 30 schools and Kirklees has 27. Luton has 22 schools and Slough 19.
A recent study found that Punjabi was the most frequently spoken language among pupils who did not have English as a first language.
After that the most popular languages were Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Somali, Polish, Arabic, Portuguese, Turkish and Tamil.But schools also have to cope with sizable populations of pupils who speak Shqip from Albania and Kosovo, Igbo from parts of Nigeria, Luganda from Uganda, Sinhala from Sri Lanka and Amharic from Ethiopia.
Anastasia De Waal, head of Family and Education at think-tank Civitas, said: “It is vital that schools are organised in such a way to adequately accommodate pupils who start school in the U.K. with weak English language foundations. In our often highly standardised classroom situations, schools are frequently asked to side-step language barriers. This significantly and needlessly hampers the progress of those children without secure English, as well as the progress of their peers.”
Kevin Courtney, deputy chief of the National Union of Teachers, insisted schools could cope as long as they had “the additional support to assist those young people who may need it”.
March 24, 2012
Conversation about this article
1: Jappnam Randhawa (India), March 24, 2012, 3:11 AM.
Pujabiaa(n) di shaan vakhri.
2: Baldev Singh (Bradford, United Kingdom), March 24, 2012, 10:55 AM.
Spoken Punjabi is one of the oldest languages on earth, but it is now mostly associated with Sikhs, even though a possible 100-200 million speak it around the globe.
3: Ranjeet (Southampton, United Kingdom), March 24, 2012, 1:23 PM.
I'd say that they are mainly Pakistanis stating their language spoken at home as Punjabi. Newham for example has 20,644 pakistanis and 6,897 Sikhs, so it's easy to see that this is more a Pakistani phenomenon. What is interesting is why they are not stating Urdu, as officially they usually do ... Hm-mm.
4: Roop Dhillon (Reigate, United Kingdom), March 24, 2012, 4:55 PM.
firstly, I wish the Punjabis in the United Kingdom could and would read and write in the language as well as speak it. Secondly, I agree with Ranjeet.
5: R. Singh (Canada), March 25, 2012, 5:28 AM.
No one holds a monopoly over langauage, even if we, the Sikhs, have been left holding the fort vis-a-vis Punjabi. It's definitely heartening to see the prodigals return after years of denial of their own culture and heritage. I wonder when our Hindu Punjabi brothers and sisters will wake up and see through their fallacy of declaring Hindi as their mother tongue and losing out on their heritage and culture in the process.
6: Simar Berki (India), March 28, 2012, 9:10 AM.
Wow! It's pleasure to hear this news ...