Le nouvel Observateur 12-06-2014
London, June 12, 2014 (AFP) - A student out of six living in England, that is more than a million children, does not have English as his/her native language, revealed official statistics on Thursday.
Statistics from the Ministry of Education for the month of January 2014 showed that for 1.11 million children enrolled in the English state schools, i.e. 16.6% of students, their "mother tongue is not, or does not seem to be English. »
In London primary schools (hosting children from 5 to 11 years), 48.1% of students do not speak English as their first language. In East Central London, these statistics reach 75.8% in the district of "Tower Hamlets" and 75.3% in "Newham", the neighboring district.
London is not the only city where these rates are high. This is also the case of Birmingham (43.1%), Bradford (43.4%), Leicester (48.8%), Luton (51.5%) and Slough (58.3%).
A spokesman of the Ministry of Education insisted on emphasizing that "the students for whom English is an additional language succeed almost as well as the students for whom English is the mother tongue" in the GCSE exam, equivalent to “Brevet des Collèges” in France..
Other results of the survey conducted by the Ministry of Education revealed that nearly 100,000 students aged 5 to 7 years studied in classes with excess pupils, exceeding the legal limit of 30 children.
Translation: Ana Megrelishvili