Mums to be excluded from colleges

[biddles]

I am an ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) teacher and thought you should know what the government is doing to further marginalise vulnerable women in our country. At the moment, mums who have come here from other countries and call Britain home have access to ESOL at college either for free if they are in receipt of benefits, or at reduced cost if their partners earn very little. However, the government has decided that only those on JSA or ESA (so called 'active benefits') will be entitled to learn English- everyone else must pay an amount that for most families is an unaffordable luxury. The social costs of this will be huge, and the hardest hit will be women who are looking after their children and therefore not on JSA. These women will not be able to integrate into society, will not be able to help their children with their homework, will not be able to access services that they are entitled to.....the list goes on. This is not about immigration, this is about fair treatment for all. These women live here, many of them are British passport holders, their kids are British, and yet they are being treated appallingly. Please help! Please write to your MP to stop these cuts going through.

Eh? Why on earth wouldn't we get asylum seekers?! They don't all get in row boats or swim the channel you know!

Sorry, I'm sure you are just thinking out loud but that is a jaw-droppingly ignorant statement.

how are asylum seekers suppossed to know these laws about asylum? i mean if something happened to me and i had to seek asylum i wouldnt know....

nailak, that's what I'm getting at - asylum seekers would have to be eligible for English teaching. But asylum seekers are already differentiated from other kinds of immigrants, so that wouldn't necessarily be a problem.

I think it's only fair to be honest with people and if we can't afford English teaching for people who're trying to decide whether they want to make a life here (ie, those who have options, not asylum seekers), we should make that clear.

imo this is the age of globilisation, people have connections across the globe, if we teach the people who come here english it is for the benefit of our own society so that those who learn english can integrate and be full and useful members of our society,

if we dont do these things then there will be pockets of people who are not integrated, cannot access school, work, etc systems cannot fully support their kids, and their will be divison and suspicions within communities and this will cause economic and social problems.

I agree it is bad if we can't teach people English. But if this isn't going to be available, people should be told that.

My brother works with immigrants a lot, and it is heartbreaking to hear about people who believed in good faith that they would be making a better lives for themselves and their families, only to find they couldn't. You can't blame people for wanting to do that. It's our system that is to blame if we take people into our country and then don't support them.

Anyway, I digress - I still don't understand why people are saying we can't afford to teach English, because surely it must be more expensive not to teach it and constantly to be sorting out the resulting difficulties down the line?

Name another country in the world who pays for non contributors to learn their language??

Italy too, anyone can go along to the state language classes.

I taught ESOL a long time ago in the UK - the students were usually women who had come over from a non-English speaking country for an arranged marriage. For these women, a free women-only group was the only way they would be allowed to learn English and so was their only chance of integrating more into this society and learning something about it. I think that was a useful social function that in the long run would pay off.

There are language tests in place for those coming as spouses.
But here is a case study.
Bahia is 37 and from Iraq. Her husband worked as an interpreter for the British army after we invaded their country. He and his family were targeted and 2 uncles were killed.
Bahia came here as a refugee. Sometimes when you flee for your life there is no time to do a language test.

by the way, all asylum seekers will be expected to pay full fees despite the fact that they only receive a proportion of the benefits UK citizens get.
In other words, they will be excluded from all education.

'Yes, there's a dear, stay in the country you were born in.
Never mind
if it's war-torn,
if you will be raped if you collect water, food and fuel outside your village or encampment,
if your parents have been killed,
if you were used as an object by your family and have to come across the world to a country which was happy to exploit yours in the past but is now too fucking busy allowing capitalists to accumalate obscene amounts of money.
So they can't spare the funding to help you integrate so that you can help your children feel as though they belong here.'

Think about people's lives all over the world not just your narrow-minded privileged enclave.