'Too few teachers' for flood of foreign pupils

Sir Mike Tomlinson, new chief adviser to the London Challenge, a programme designed to boost achievement in the capital's toughest areas, spoke out as hundreds of foreign children are arriving each week unable to speak English.

He said the expertise needed to get them up to the level where they could cope with the national curriculum was "in short supply". The Government says schools are getting more money to pay for teachers of English as an additional language.

Sir Mike said he would not hesitate to demand more cash if it would tackle the problem, adding: "The first question I am asking is whether provision for children with English as an additional language gets them to the level necessary."

Ministers say the Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant covers the cost of specialist teachers and assistants needed by schools with large proportions of pupils who do not speak English at home.

But Sir Mike, a former head of education watchdog Ofsted, said: "That expertise is, I think, in short supply."

He promised to lobby ministers for an increase in resources for English language teaching, adding: "I will be arguing for the ways and means, including money to enable us to increase that expertise."

Four out of 10 primary age children in London now speak a language other than English at home and schools sometimes have to take up to eight new arrivals a week, according to headteachers.

London primary schools took in more than 197,000 children for whom English was not their first language last year, up from just over 190,000 in 2006.

Secondary schools saw their proportion of non-native English speakers go up from 33.5 per cent to 35.3 per cent in the same period.

Most are concentrated in inner London - in Tower Hamlets, three quarters of primary pupils are not native English speakers, compared with only 5.6 per cent in Havering. The Department for Children, Schools and Families said the grant was keeping pace with demand, going up from £178.6million this year to £206.6 million in 2010-11.

Sir Mike is to set out the London Challenge goals for the next three years, with particular focus on how the school improvement lessons learned at secondary level can be extended to struggling primary schools.

"We particularly want to close the attainment gap between pupils of different socio-economic groups," he said.

A Children's Department spokeswoman said: "London has wide experience of English as an additional language issues and a concentration of qualified teachers. The capital is also well-funded per pupil compared with other areas.

"But ensuring that pupils with English as a second language are properly pro-vided for is something we constantly keep under review and we are developing plans to increase support to schools even further which will be announced in due course."