At age 5 (end of Early Years) white British outperform every single ethnicity except Indians. By age 11 (end of Primary School) white British are sixteenth, and are outperformed by many different ethnicities. As others have posted, in the later years, EAL (English as an Additional Language) children, on average, perform better than white British. The reasons are myriad and certainly some ethnicities have an educational culture that teachers would love to see in every kid: Chinese and Indian being the mots cherished. But I come back to my original post - we have thousands of young children in Manchester, arriving monthly from “Europe” (having originated in Africa, Pakistan and other rather more non-European places), and they bring with them a massive, unsustainable drain on schools’ resources; on teachers’ energies; on the very infra-structure of our education.
I teach all children to the very best of my ability. I work tirlessly to ensure any child gets the best deal - and that is a deal that includes finding them and their families housing; getting them Speech and Language Therapists; Occupaaional Therapists; Educational Psychologists; Doctors; Nurses -anything basically that will allow them to live a decent life. BUT, it isn’t sustainable. It cannot continue - all the posters saying we should treat all equally - I do. But I know that the numbers of teachers leaving the system is at shockingly high levels; the numbers of Deputies such as myself unwilling to take the step to headship is at crisis levels - migration isn’t the solitary cause. But it’s a factor. A large one.
If you filmed the meetings where the school leaders have to be allocated unplaced kids by the council, and heard and witnessed how the system is trying to accommodate unfettred access to this country, you could only come to one conclusion: it’s insane. It’s a bottomless pit that sucks money into it. But hey, it’s the freedom of border that the EU wants. And our kids are just as entitled to go to Spain, France etc. And yet, and yet…it doesn’t quite work like that does it.
The National Audit Office: over a quarter of a million more children were placed in primary schools in the last 18 months. If anyone thinks that’s nothing to do with the EU, then they’re living in cloud cuckoo land. And if anyone thinks it’s sustainable they’re welcome to tell me how.
