To want your experiences of non English speakers in your child's primary school class?

[TheClacksAreDown]

I'm currently looking at primary schools for DC1 as we will be applying for reception places at the end of the year. We are in London and there is a shortage of primary school places so not much in the way of choice.

Our best shot at a community school is a large one about a 15 minute walk away. Due to its size and the geography it pulls from a variety of areas and those areas range from well heeled to pretty deprived. Looking at the Ofsted and info on findaschool.info I can see that the school is pretty ethnically diverse. I'm totally fine with all of that and would prefer they don't live in a pure middle class bubble. The bit that gives me cause to pause is the level of English spoken. It looks like nearly half don't have English as their first language and a sizeable minority of those start with limited/no English at all. Looking at the ethnicity split I think the first languages would be relatively split rather than concentrated in one language.

This is a really different set up to the primary school I attended - my family lived in a very white suburban area where everyone spoke English and the school was 99% white british. So what I don't know is what it is like when there is a large proportion of non-native English speakers, particularly those who don't speak it well. I know kids learn quickly and of course they have to learn but when I mentioned this to my mother she was appalled that I would look to put DC into such a school - she was convinced that their education would suffer. We have the possibility of a religious school which seems to be 80% white and 90% English first language or a private school that is ethnically diverse but very professional middle class.

So - did/do your kids attend a school where there were a lot of non-English speakers and did you find it impacted their education?

We got none of our choices for Reception admissions. We had two main concerns about the school we were allocated: firstly, the turnover was very high (virtually no one who started in Reception was still there by Y6) and, secondly, much of the first two years was spent bringing children up-to-scratch in English. We were concerned because our daughter had been an early speaker and also was most difficult when she was bored (which we were worried she would be if the focus was at the lower end of language skills). In the brief time we were there, it was very difficult to interact socially with parents with very limited English language skills who talked only to their compatriots.

In some ways, that school was better than another local one, where there are just two main languages and a rather more obvious degree of separation: in the first school, everyone is in a minority.

I love the diversity of my City; we live and work with people from all across the world and have friends and neighbours from most cultures but we didn't want our daughter treading water linguistically and messing about because she was bored.

I work in a school that has a high number of new to English children. Most new to the country children learn very quickly and have almost caught up with a year. Most of these children have economic migrants or oversees students as parents. Family attitudes to learning is very good.
70% of children come from second or third generation migrants from one particular ethnic group. Most have one parent that doesn't speak English. Attitudes towards education is poor and the children are weak in both home language and English. These children make much slower progress from low starting points.
All playground chat is in English and no friendship issues really except they doesn't often socialise outside of their family groups so little scope for play dates and parties etc. last year one of the 4 white children in the class invited everyone to a party, only 6 turned up . We have had people move schools for these social reasons.

Not a problem. Both DD and DS (6 year age gap) have attended schools from prep age where the predominant language spoken at home is not English. All the kids pick it up very quickly and most do very well academically. At the moment, DD is attending the second top selective school in our state which she had to write an exam for three years ago .... the kids are mostly from East Indian and Chinese backgrounds.

Surely there are plenty of children that falls between the cracks of "native english speaker" and "english as a second language" though?

I ask totally out of interest, but what would a bilingual child fall under (who has grown up learning each language from each parent, so genuinely bilingual)?

My daughter goes to an ethnically diverse community primary school in inner London. Whilst most children are European and Caucasian, my daughter mixes with children with many different first languages. The common language is English. But her friends speak French, Spanish, Polish, Malay, Chinese, Arabic, Yoruban, and Hindi at home. It's a very high achieving state school, and the highest achievers don't speak English at home. Kids pick up languages so quickly, and help each other in difficulty.

My daughter says one of her close friends who is Spanish sometimes loses her point of conversation in English, so everyone else supplies the word or meaning for her. A more confident Spanish /English dual speaker classmate is always helping the Spanish girl out. It fosters a sense of community and kindness. My daughter also likes learning Spanish from her friend. The school also runs Mandarin classes for the kids.

It's really nothing to worry about. I think it has helped my daughter with her world view. She likes to look at maps and says one day she will go to India /Malaysia /Poland because so and so's mummy comes from there. I don't think it impedes their learning because kids are so quick at picking up a common tongue. (In my view its very old fashioned to think that the opposite is true) If we lived in Spain I would assume my daughter would pick up Spanish and learn in Spanish, yet still speak English at home. It's normal in many places, especially as globalisation increases and it's a World Village.

Some interesting experiences here. I'm going to try and get a better look around the school and get some information on how they handle the issue and then try and test whether that holds true against some people who send their kids there now.

my children are at a highly selective prep and I would estimate 1/2 the children don't have English as a first language. They are known as "bilingual" as that is considered an entirely positive thing

Don't feel bad for asking the question OP

My DSs go to a school with around 30 languages. The kids are all cockneys and I've never noticed a problem communication with the children. Parents is another matter. I've been involved with the PTA and am aware you have to be careful when you write to parents because a lot of them won't be reading English well. It just takes a different and wider way of communicating. In many ways it keeps the school on their toes as they can't be complacent when it comes to communication: so no you won't get all parents via email, or via letters home. Sometimes you have to go up to them and talk to them. Not a bad thing all round though?

In the last couple of years we have had a lot of children arrive at DD's primary from abroad. As others said, they are from such a range of countries that they all mix in.

I went to the nativity at Xmas and the funniest thing is the DC with the strongest local accents are all those who arrived with no English

A different perspective:

We lived abroad for a few years and DCs attended the local primary school for that time. At the time they started my DCs didnt speak a word of the local language.

There were a few children who also spoke English at home as we did. On one occasion my DD was told not to use English with her English speaking friends at school as the other children werent happy. They happily flicked back to the local language.

Problem solved.

I guess a question for your school would be how they handle playground languages and is there any input from staff?