Schools: Recruitment and Retention

Baroness Sharples Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sharples (Con)]

My Lords, is not the great increase in the number of pupils with English as a second language making life very difficult for teachers?

[Lord Nash]

As we have discussed before, there is no doubt that initially pupils who either do not speak English or have poor English do make life difficult for teachers, but the evidence is clear that those pupils, once they can speak the language—which many of them do relatively quickly—can be, to put it bluntly, much more aspirational. As we now all know, although we spend a lot of time compiling statistics on what we call English as additional language pupils, it is in fact white working-class pupils who are falling behind dramatically in our schools. That is why we are making such a substantial investment in coastal towns, former mining villages and other such communities to improve education.