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.