Sussex schoolchildren speaking 94 languages (From The Argus)
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Sussex schoolchildren speaking 94 languages
2:30pm Friday 12th November 2010 in News By Naomi Loomes
School children in Sussex are speaking an incredible 94 languages.
New figures, produced as part of a project to help migrant workers integrate into communities, revealed that thousands of bilingual students are chatting in anything from Urdu to Igbo.
Experts said it was important to support children’s use of their mother tongue while also tackling misinformation and stereotyping.
A spokesman for West Sussex County Council said 3,231 bilingual pupils in its schools speak dozens of different languages, including Wolof – a language spoken in Senegal, and Igbo a tongue from Nigeria and the Niger-Congo.
Crawley was flagged up as being particularly diverse, with Urdu being the most common language after English with 1,652 speakers. It was closely followed by Gujurati, Caribbean Creole French, Tamil and Punjabi.
In Worthing Bangladeshi and Pakistani rank the highest.
For full report see today's Argus.
Comments(11)
Morpheus
says...
3:52pm Fri 12 Nov 10
Frank Booth
says...
4:04pm Fri 12 Nov 10
Rostrum
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4:29pm Fri 12 Nov 10
HJarrs
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4:34pm Fri 12 Nov 10
rs
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5:25pm Fri 12 Nov 10
"Experts said it was important to support children’s use of their mother tongue"
Whilst in school these kids should be learning english and when they're upto a reasonable standard only ever spoken to in english. As morpehus says, what they speak at home is up to them but whiule in state schools english only.
acoustic
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7:08pm Fri 12 Nov 10
Andy R
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9:27pm Fri 12 Nov 10
rs
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10:09pm Fri 12 Nov 10
Andy R wrote:instead of clever remarks, why don't you actually respond with an argument?
Hopefully rs and Morpheous never have to stray too far from their back gardens. The outside world would be truly terrifying for them.
timetravel1980
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11:22pm Fri 12 Nov 10
TheInsider
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10:03am Sat 13 Nov 10
The private sector was pushed to one side in the last ten years and the public sector became the UK's leading employer. The public sector is a local employer, not needing to look outside it's back garden. It didn't need mutli-lingual staff to deal with the wider world.
Now these jobs are being cut and the private sector is being asked to take over the UK again.
The private sector needs a diverse workforce who speak many languages.
As countries fight for Chinese, Russian and Indian contracts, multi-lingual staff are vital. Many services delivered to UK companies are based offshore so once again, having multi-lingual staff in these posts is of huge value.
Look through some of the national newspaper job pages.
I work for a large UK company. We have been taking many EU graduates as they speak English and up to two other languages as well as having studied their respective degree whether it be economics, maths, engineering etc.
It's just a fact of life that the world has got smaller.
UglyAmerican says...
3:42pm Fri 12 Nov 10