to be shocked but not surprised when a teacher says "With children where English isn't spoken at home... not much you can do?"

[toilettrouble]

This Times blog why I hate my child's school

is a rant about what I presume is a typical primary in South London. But read the last bit!

I went to a school where I was taught in 'foreign', as were the 29 other people in my class, none of whom had the school's language as their first one. No one, but no one, expected any the less of us.

Do you think that racism is just an excuse for poor teaching?

Seems to be a lot of negative attitudes at this school if the writer is to be believed but, yes, it does seem a very trite comment. I know a child whose parents only speak to her in one of two European languages at home - and lots of children who are brought up speaking a single other European language - and they are not seen as "problems" by their schools: it's more "How wonderful that they have this skill." Problem seems to be when language spoken doesn't correlate with anywhere the teachers want to spend a holiday.

Message withdrawn

I utterly agree with you. Is there a way that teachers who come out with this racist stuff can be reported? or something?

The quiet, slipped-in tone of it makes it worse - at least if the woman had been a paid-up member of the BNP others would have known she was a risk.

Grr.

hardhat: Problem seems to be when language spoken doesn't correlate with anywhere the teachers want to spend a holiday.

Brilliant comment, utterly true...

First time I have posted in ages and I'm called brilliant... I'm blushing.

Absolutely outrageous. Having parents who don't speak the "school" language does put the children at a slight disadvantage but should not stop them from doing well.

My parents were clueless but it just meant that my sisters and I grew up completely bilingual and ended up going to v good universities.

I work with preschool children with disabilities. The majority of my families dont have English as a home language. It can make things more complicated and takes more effort on my part. But thats my job.

The children and their parents try just as hard and those with English as a first language. They care just as much about their children.

Bilingual children's speech can be delayed slightly as they work things out but they soon catch up. How can speaking more than one language be a disadvantage?

As already said if it were French it would all be fine.

But NOT if the family were Africa, and French speaking I would bet.

I agree that the teacher sounds awful. And deeply stupid. Not to mention that a lot of non-english-speaking children (who I knew in a deprived part of SE london) already spoke 3 or 4 languages at home by the time they started school - adding another took weeks.

at Hardhat. The teacher should go to Kandahar on holiday, or Congo, or Kurdistan.

What gets me most is that bilingualism, or indeeded speaking several languages, is one of the few skills proven to make a child brainier all round.

No choice but to conclude this woman is simply a loopy racist. Why is she still in work as a teacher if she is acting in a racist way towards the pupils?

This morning's media assessment of bad schools - Ofsted citing a "hardcore of inadequate teachers" - seems rather an understatement in the circs.

Kinell.

bump

My SIL and her DH speak in Shona 95% of the time at home to their 2 DD's.

Their 2 DD's speak with very posh Hampshire accents when they're speaking English (which they speak very well).

Funny how you never get these reactions when your child's other language is that of a wealthy- and white country.

I would have thought speaking Punjabi would actually be more of an advantage in life than speaking Swedish, yet it's me who gets told how wonderful it must be for my dcs to have another language.

although don't know if the fact that my SIL's English (and her DH's) is also excelelnt so on the rare occasions it is used at home there's no communications issues.

Actually a bit of a standing joke in DH's close family that most of them speak better English than I do..........and I'm English born and bred

Sounds like the school is being apallingly managed, moral is crap and the teachers aren't motivated any more.

I think it is jsut an excuse for their lack of motivation. dd went to a school, where she was one of the only two white children in the class. The majority of the children spoke english as a second language or not at all. It didn't stop them from teaching. They had language support assistants and the children developed their english very quickly. Children do pick up language so quickly with the right support, it is abs no reason to impact their education.

The teacher who said that should leave the profession.

My DS's school has a very high proportion of kids who's first language isn't English. It's a great school - good Ofsted, great head teacher and a 100% positive and celebratory attitude towards different cultures, languages etc.

Well the school does sound absolutely gruesome (and, no, not "typical" for a South London primary).

The comment from the outgoing headteacher was odd but do you think the blogger agreed with it? She was unhappy with the school before and hoped the new head would bring change. She doesn't appear to be any sort of fan of the outgoing head.

All of her moaning about the school seems to be about the lack of enthusiasm amongst the staff and hostility towards the parents - which is of course catastrophic in a school. I think the blogger is entitled to hate the school.

Standard advice though is to speak to your children in your mother tongue. Agree, it's pure racism. If the kids were speaking french or whatever at home, I bet these comments wouldn't be made, grrr.

We only speak english at home. Never German. My kids go to school here in Germany. Typically get A's in other subjects, and B or C in German grammar. I would laugh at anyone who suggested we only spoke German at home. DOn't get me wrong, I can speak German, but they'd learn nothing from me other than a heap of grammatical mistakes.

I remember someone (ggrandad in law) moaning at me a couple of years ago about all the immigrants in London, where they live, and how it annoyed them hearing them walking along the street 'jabbering' in their own language. I politely pointed out that here, we are the immigrants and we 'jabber' to our family at home and - shock horror - in public in our own language ie English, and why not? After all, if we didn't speak English to them, they wouldn't be able to speak the language and thus to him (great grandad)

Appaling attitude to take. My DC's both go to a Welsh medium school - neither DH nor I speak Welsh (although I am learning). DS 1 (6) is completely fluent in Welsh and English and reads both equally well, DS 2 (4) is becomimg more Welsh by the day. Both have friends who only speak Welsh at home and they are equally able to 'flit' between both languages.

I thought that bilingualism was supposed to be celebrated, not used as a poor excuse for lazy teaching...

Can I play devil's advocate here? While I'm totally on board about how much of an advantage it is to be bi or even trilingual, is it possible that the head teacher was misinterpreted?

Let's start from the position that speaking many languages is an advantage. However, in learning to read English, might not the children be disadvantaged if their parents are not literate in English? Language aquisition takes place in a different part of the brain when you are an adult. You may be quite fluent in one language but be borderline illiterate in it. For example, I know enough German to have a simple conversation and follow the plot of TV shows, but my reading of German reaches as far as being able to decipher a menu and not a lot else. If I was trying to help DD learn to read in German I would be stumped and unable to help her post about reading age 8. Of course, I would probably take the attitude that I maight as well take the advantage of having simple readers in the house to improve my reading as well, but then I also work full time and don't have a lot in the way of spare time.

slug - but surely that means that all those children that learn foreign languages at school - and have parents at home who are totally illiterate in French/German/Italian/Spanish (insert any other language taught in schools these days) would be disadvantaged in the same way.

tbh my input in dd's learning to read has been minimal: she was always too tired to concentrate on her homework in infants

but she did spend 6..5 hours of her most active and awake time in the company of people specially trained to teach reading- so she learnt anyway

she has also learnt to read her minority language- again with minimal input from me

I think often a positive attitude from parents is more important than the actual work put in

But HT seems to be saying that getting children with parents whose first language isn't English to keep up with their peers isn't really do-able after the age of 8 across the board (the implication being that all parents that weren't born in the UK probably don't speak English at all well themselves and/or aren't educated to a high level).

I think we all accept that if the parents of a child speak no or very little English then it makes things harder for the child academically - they can only rely on limited help with homework and projects, for example - but this is something the school should tackle rather than use as an excuse. The majority of academic learning should be within the school and the home circumstances should only have minimal impact in a good school.

Sorry x-posts

cory I agree with your last sentence. I've always been terribly at actually doing the stuff at home with my DS's -but I do encourage them, and they know how important education is (blah blah blah lol). They're doing well at school despite me sitting down at home "doing" the stuff with them, rather just supervising them doing it themselves.

Interesting point alwayslookingforanswers. In the UK we tend not to start teaching foreign languages until after a basic literacy in the native language is established. While the human brain is hardwired to aquire spoken language, written language, as anyone with dyslexia will tell you, is something completely different. Trying to teach two different spelling, grammar and in some cases symbols simultaneously is not common practise because it's a very, very difficult thing for a child to do and involves a completely different part of the brain from spoken language. Without wanting to go into the complexities of the development of symbolic reasoning in the brain, there's a very good reason why we don't start to teach children to write until after their grasp of their native spoken language is established. Bear in mind we start to teach our children to write English 3 to 5 years after they start to speak it.

Would my child be disadvantaged in learning to write Spanish/German/Italian/French? Probably yes. I'm shamefully monolingual.