Up popped Nigel Farage on my Facebook feed this morning to tell us the alarming news that “Nearly 1 in 3 schoolchildren in Glasgow do not speak English as their first language”. Is it true?
I plugged some keywords into my search engine and discovered a certain sector of the media were all over this story: the first hits were the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express and GB News.
I figured the Daily Telegraph was the most likely to provide a source, so I opened that story first.
The statistic
The first thing that struck me (apart from the decision to use a picture of two children sitting in front of a house with no roof on it to demonstrate what the supposedly non-English-speaking children look like) was that the actual figure was 28.8 per cent. I appreciate that converting percentages to ratios can make statistics easier to understand, but that’s a hell of a lot of rounding! One third is equal to 33.3 percent, so the approximation used by Farage and the aforementioned newspapers inflates the figure by 4.5 percentage points (or 15.6 per cent). It would have been far more accurate to say “more than 1 in 4” or “almost 3 in 10”.
“Do not speak English as their first language” vs. “English as an additional language”
The next thing that struck me was that, once you got past the headline, the Daily Telegraph noted that this was the percentage of people who spoke “English as an additional language”.
According to the official figures for the Glasgow City local authority:
- 3,299 pupils were “new to English”
- 6,100 pupils were at the “early acquisition” stage
- 7,288 pupils had “developing competence”
- 3,401 were “competent”
- 629 were “fluent”
- 50,184 had English as their “first language”
- 1,056 pupils have “unknown” competence in English
The 28.8 per cent is the result of combining the first five categories, so it includes the 1,001 pupils who speak English fluently, but not as their first language, and the 3,401 who are competent in English. Take these away and the percentage falls to 23.2%.
The figures are also broken down by primary and secondary education and show that pupils’ English skills increase greatly between primary and secondary education. In other words – as anyone who has witnessed children raised in a foreign country will know – the vast majority of children end up becoming fully bilingual by the time they leave school.
Bilingualism – a huge resource
The figures released can be looked at through a positive light. In Glasgow, 147 different languages are spoken by children at home. Just think how attractive that will make Glasgow for international companies when these bilingual children grow up. The chap who spent 20 years living in Brussels without learning any French or Dutch might think being monolingual in English is something to be proud of, but most people who speak a second language (including, I hope, his bilingual (possibly trilingual) children) see languages as an asset.