The Sunday Express has recently taken local councils to task for funding after school community language classes. In an article (15.04.12) entitled 'We pay tutors to teach immigrants their own language', the paper encourages readers to be outraged by the news that some councils continue to support community language teaching and to applaud local authorities where this provision has already been cut.
The articles focuses on Tower Hamlets, where the council is spending £185,000 on supporting mother tongue classes for pupils in Bengali, Arabic and Urdu delivered in local community venues. The money is distributed via small grants to supplementary schools and supported by the Council as such classes celebrate diversity, promote community cohesion and helps children prepare for early GCSEs in the language they speak at home. A Tower Hamlets spokesperson noted that the borough teaches 'community languages for two reasons: proficiency in a mother tongue aids with proficiency in a second language. And secondly, pride and knowledge in your own background aids in promoting community cohesion'. Within the article, it is noted that many councils have cut such services due to the difficult economic climate, a fact which many professionals in our field will be only too aware of.
Unlike the Sunday Express, NALDIC does not celebrate the cuts which have been made to local community grant funding which have impacted hard on struggling supplementary schools up and down the country. Research has consistently shown the academic and social value of maintaining and developing first language proficiency and the advantages this provides in the learning of English as an additional language. Whilst the introduction of the EBacc has prompted an increase in the opportunities for pupils to take a qualification in their ‘home’ language at GCSE, community languages are still most usually taught off timetable, often supported or facilitated by the dedicated, and mainly voluntary, staff of supplementary schools. Without these organisations, many schools would struggle to turn in such good results in GCSE examinations in community languages and would also be denying many of our bilingual British young people the opportunity to achieve their full potential.
