British schools are receiving a record £540 million a year in additional funding from the government to educate children who don’t speak English as their native language.
According to Department for Education (DfE) figures obtained by the Daily Mail, the government has increased spending on education for non-native English speaking students by £125 million ($165m) over the past five years alone. This means that annual spending has now reached a record high of £540 million ($710m).
The paper noted that the money is divvied up among schools based on the number of students who have English “as an additional language,” and the bulk of the funding is spent on English as a second language teachers, bilingual teaching assistants, and even translators to communicate with parents.
As a result of the Westminster establishment-driven mass migration into the country, some schools have been forced into devoting whole classrooms for migrant children, who are separated until they attain enough written and oral English skills to join the native students.
The director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, Professor Alan Smithers, said: “The data are yet another example of the distorting effect of uncontrolled immigration.
“English-born children need all the help they can get, 40 per cent failed GCSE English last year. Instead, the money is going on teaching English as a second language.
“If foreign-born children are here legally, we have a moral duty to educate them, but the Government really must get on top of illegal migration.”
The record levels of migration, which began under the Tony Blair administration and were turbo-charged by Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit immigration liberalisations, have had a dramatic impact on the makeup of the British education system.
According to a July report, there are now 1.8 million non-native English speakers in schools, or around one in five students. This was approximately 700,000 more than there were a decade ago.
A separate report found that white British students are now minorities in a quarter of all 25,000 primary and secondary schools in England.
This is likely to exacerbate further the issues facing white working-class students, who the government admitted earlier this year have long been “ignored” as they fell behind other ethnic groups.
Some, including Oxford University Professor Peter Edwards, have argued that white working-class students have often been seen as “unfashionable” and “not worthy” and that many see them as having “inherent advantage or privilege” because of their skin colour, regardless of their socio-economic background.
Chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, Chris McGovern, who argues that there should be a 20 per cent cap on non-English speakers in schools, said: “In terms of educational attainment, children of immigrants are a roaring success story as most of their parents are highly motivated and place the highest value on education.
“But their needs have distracted schools from the white working-class, who are stuck at the bottom of attainment league tables and are falling further and further behind. By ignoring them, we are storing up massive problems for the future by creating a large unemployed and unemployable part of our population.
“We need to stop feeling so sorry for immigrant children and shed a few tears for the forgotten generation, white working-class kids. They are the Cinderella kids who never get to go to the educational ball.”
