Thursday, April 26, 2007

"I Believe That Children Are Our Future ..."

BBC - it's the annual gathering of the PANDA report figures.

When special schools are included, 798,210 pupils in England's state schools do not speak English as their first language. About one in seven children at primary school in England and one in 10 at secondary school speak a language other than English at home. The figures come from the government's annual school census.

At primary level, 21.9% of pupils are from ethnic minorities, up from 20.6% last year. In secondary schools, the figure is 17.7%, up from 16.8% in 2006.

Anyone who does not describe themselves as being white British is defined as an ethnic minority in the census.

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

But immigrants will be just like 'native' Brits once they've been through the first class school system, remember "Culture trumps genes"
So what are you so worried about?

Anonymous said...

Those percentages are very averaged over Salisbury and Sevenoaks to massage down the figures in Bradford, Burnley, Oldham, Bury, Leicester, etc

The figures at Bradford University are c. 50%; and in Bradford City primary schools c. 60-95%. They even have schools in West Bowling filled with Urdu speakers now been filled up with Slovaks.......the joys of multi-cultural multi-lingualism.

Laban said...

It would be true - if we had a strong culture and a decent education system

Anonymous said...

I did notice on the BBC News last night that at last there might actually be an issue and a cost to untramelled immigration. Bot this report and another later in relation to immigrants and there effect on the labour market where they for the first time acknowledged that there is a cost to the native population. Maybe the message is slowly filtering through that there are people who are paying the price for this and it is not the middle and professional classes who only receive the benefits of immigration: immigrants don't take the jobs of editors or lawyers but of labourers and farm-workers.

Anonymous said...

The increase in 'minority' pupils is going up at about 7/8% per year.

It won't be long before they are over 50%.

A Brummie said...

I don't suppose white English is one of the check boxes eh?

Anonymous said...

I did notice on the BBC News last night that at last there might actually be an issue

Yes but once the local elections are past it will be back to sneering as usual.

Interestingly enough BBC World service revels in Obama and Clinton and US politics with not a word about British elections....funny to think anyone would want to listen to BBC to hear about life in Britain.....much better for BBC to show itself as a subsidiary of VOA

Anonymous said...

This is for Dave...why is 'native' in quotes? Aren't there any native Brits? Odd, I thought I was one...perhaps my birth certificate was faked up in Africa. O my gosh, I never thought of that! Now I'm beginning to worry...
Well, I suppose in one or two cases, culture MAY trump genes. So what about the culture these kids are getting at home or from their peers.
I've been viewing an interesting but MOST distressing little series of videos from Richmond College which as far as I'm concerned completely short-circuit any argument on this one; http://youtube.com/watch?v=cLQ8D88uXI0
Type that lot in very carefully (sorry I don't know how to make URLs active on this hospitable site)and if you can stomach it, watch all the sordid offerings of offal from the same source. Perhaps the answer is that these poor kids only arrived here a few weeks ago,and so missed their primary school dose of overtrumping.

Anonymous said...

So laban, if we had a good education system and a stronger culture similar to that of 50 years ago, you'd then be just fine with the English becoming a minority in England?
As a long term reader of this blog I very much doubt you would.


And besides the reality is large scale immigration causes a weakening of the host culture so your statement that large scale immigration would be ok with a strong culture is an oxymoron.

Anonymous said...

Just had a look at the Richmond College vids on youtube (just type in Richmond college).

Those upper-middle class souls!! What did they do to deserve this?

Anonymous said...

Verity

HTML

Anonymous said...

HTML

This may be better

Anonymous said...

I believe that the figures are vastly underestimated. No one actually knows how many people are in this country.

Anonymous said...

I believe that the figures are vastly underestimated. No one actually knows how many people are in this country.

I think we should take a leaf out of Caesar Augustus' book and have a Census whereby everyone has to return to the birthplace of the head of household

Anonymous said...

Leaving aside any issues about immigration, children are perfectly capable or learning and speaking two or even three languages from an early age, and in many ways it stimulates their minds to do so.

Anonymous said...

Voyager - I have not posted on this thread, so there is no reason to address me.

Anonymous said...

I think that would be Veritas not Verity.

Anonymous said...

anonymous 12:42 - as I pointed out.