Migrants required to pass A Level Standard of English

[onceuponatimeinneverland]

www.gov.uk/government/news/migrants-will-be-required-to-pass-a-level-standard-of-english
Just heard this on the news. Is it me or is it totally mad? Especially when you look at the relatively poor standard of speaking, listening, reading and writing that exists already for those actually born in the UK rather than migrating in.

I'm presuming that applicants won't actually have to sit A Level English language as that would be even madder.

Or maybe its entirely sensible. I'm all for having a literal workforce.

What do other countries request I wonder (can't be fussed to actually look).

Yes I am BU - A Level standard English is the bare minimum
No you aren't BU - Its mad

That makes way more sense. I did A level French and could probably have just about coped if I'd moved to France after my A levels - I was conversationally fluent and could have done a basic job.

That level is reasonable for someone doing a professional job - Dr, engineer, teacher etc - but not sure it’s realistic otherwise

Average reading age of a daily mail reader in age 10-11. Yet they are driving this move. Oh the irony!

My elderly DM and I recently endured my DF’s 6 month assessment at his nursing home. He has advanced Alzheimer’s and can’t speak so was physically present but otherwise absent. My DM is deaf and wears hearing aids. The nurse we met with was very pleasant and I’m sure is competent but her spoken English was so heavily accented, and sometimes oddly worded, as to be almost incomprehensible. My DM understand nothing that she said and I reckon I probably got maybe a quarter of what she said. And that was at the start of the almost 2 hour meeting - it is really exhausting to spend that amount of time struggling to understand someone. Fortunately she was working her way through a form so we were able to read the questions - which gave me a background to what she was saying. Without that form I would have understood even less.

In jobs like healthcare and caring a high standard of English, both written and spoken is essential. Communication is really important and when it is so poor there is a real risk of errors or even harm.

It is also very upsetting not to be able to communicate with those who are looking after you or a loved one. Almost 24 years ago, when my DS was a tiny, less than 5lb, 5 week old baby, he was admitted to hospital for emergency surgery. The admitting doctor’s English was so poor that he was reduced to communicating the problem and solution to me by drawing pictures on a bit of paper! It made an already extremely stressful situation so much worse.

That’s a good point. A high standard of spoken English should be a pre-requisite of any forward-facing role.

Not so serious but there are plenty of station announcers out there who are incomprehensible.

Definitely beneficial if people are actually intending on working in the UK. When I have to ring a company my stomach sinks when it’s answered by someone with broken poor English. Or when I visited my mum in hospital last week and a nurse could barely communicate with her in English (which was difficult anyway as mums partially deaf!) if you choose to live in a country you should make the effort to speak good English.

I think Labour need headlines and want some Reform votes back. The one in one out seems to have flopped so they’ve turned to other stuff.

But I assume they can’t speak and understand English at least. Let’s be honest, people who can’t read are probably not going to be in jobs where they have to be customer facing anyway. More likely to be in manual low skilled work.

and has been for many many years. In the late eighties I did some volunteering for the National Adult Literacy Scheme. In the training, we were told that in order to function in society, people needed to have the same literacy age, so reading AND writing, as an 11 year old child. Coincidentally, at the time this was the level of reading and compehension required to read the Sun newspaper. Of course many (most) of the people who used the service went further but that was the bar for us to achieve as helpers.

The Sun has a reading age of about 8. All the important words are in capitals as well. So it will be “SICK PERVERT stole woman’s KNICKERS”. Just to really hammer the message home.

Maybe that would come if schools weren’t over populated here, with too many people coming to the UK. Smaller class sizes would help strengthen education and give children more of a chance to actually receive adequate teaching and learning….

Should read ‘can’..

I don't think it's A level English that people in England would sit (with English as their mother tongue).
It's the equivalent of having to speak French to (our) A level standard to emigrate to France. That seems fair enough. It's not generally considered a fluent enough level to work in a professional job in that language, which I think is a level or two above that.

I bet you any money you like that if someone qualifies as a skilled immigrant and moves here with dependents that granny and grandad won’t have to have any English skills whatever…

I passed GCSE French but I wouldn't have been able to cope living in France. I think this is fair enough tbh

I'm guessing English A Level for a non native speaker is going to be a different thing than that for a native speaker.

So because the standard of literacy amongst the existing population is poor, that means it’s fine to accept migrants who also have a poor grasp of English??

That truly is dumbing down. If I was emigrating to a country where English wasn’t the first language, I would fully expect to have to demonstrate that I could read, speak and write in the native language with a significant degree of proficiency. What’s more, I’m not sure why, as a migrant, I wouldn’t want to do that - how could I ever integrate and engage with society fully if I couldn’t speak the language?

Where you might have a point is that A Level standard may be too high - however, I’d need to understand what that standard was first before commenting. That said, there’s no way I could live and fully integrate in France with my GCSE French.

That's most care homes closing, then.

is that your opinion or do you have proof of the reading age? It was none of our business to judge what the students chose to read. At the time it was really hard to find age 11 level reading material aimed at adults and we needed some level to set the bar against..... It still might be, I don't know as I haven't been involved for years. No we didn't use it for lessons or tests. It was something that we, the helpers could look at to get a feel for where we needed to set the bar.

I wonder how many of those 2,125 were actually German as well?

I’m all for it. The amount of money we waste on translators for people in medical situations or legal situations is ridiculous.

The total cost for UK government and NHS translation and interpretation services is not published in a single figure, but available data from 2024-2025 indicates the Department for Work and Pensions spent an average of £8 million annually on benefit claimants and the police spent £19 million in 2022-2023. The Telegraph reported that the NHS has spent a total of £80 million on these services since 2020.

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)

The DWP spent an average of £8 million per year on interpreters for benefit claimants in 2023-2024, The Telegraph reported.
The DWP spent £27 million over the five years from 2019 to 2023 on interpreters.
National Health Service (NHS)

Since 2020, the NHS has spent £80 million on language and translation services for patients who do not speak English.
In the past five years, the NHS spent approximately £15.8 million annually on these services.
Other Public Sector Spending

In 2022-2023, the police across the UK spent a combined total of £19 million on translation and interpretation services, with the Metropolitan Police accounting for over £6 million of that total, The Telegraph reports.
Overall Trend

Overall, the public sector has awarded over 300 translation contracts worth £403 million in the past five years.

In the overall UK budget these figures are pretty small sums and much of the time necessary in order for services to do their jobs properly. BUT what they don't account for is the drain on the charity sectors that work alongside these services and also they remove the incentive to learn functional english. Should a person who has been in the country 10 years still be able to get paid for translation services? Does it benefit society to have ghettos that segregate people because they've never had to learn the language? I think in order to integrate society better I think these are problems we need to address.

People need to be able to communicate clearly and understand what is said to them, otherwise they can’t do the job. Nobody has a translator with them all the time. Becomes more and more challenging as the jobs become more skilled.

I’ve experienced the rough end of this.

I had an encounter with a nurse who became very aggressive when I repeatedly failed to understand what she was asking me. I’m the most friendly and non-confrontational person you could meet, but after being shouted at and scolded for several minutes and reduced to tears before an Echo scan, I reluctantly decided to make a complaint. I was reluctant because a) I know the NHS has massive recruitment problems now and b) the obvious reason- I was afraid of being thought a racist (the nurse was from an African country).

But her behaviour was totally unprofessional. She hurried off in front of me when she could have walked beside me, did not look at me (so I couldn’t lip read) and gave instructions as I followed behind her. Her accent was impenetrable.I was apologetic about not understanding her but she absolutely went off on one as a result.

Good functional English, yes. A level standard- ridiculous.

If you actually read the details, it’s not all migrants, it’s those on highly skilled visas of various categories.

the standard is a practical English certification exam rather than the sort those who are native speakers learn