Punjabi is the most frequently spoken language among pupils who do not have English as a first language. After that the most popular languages were Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Somali, Polish, Arabic, Portuguese, Turkish and Tamil.
Classrooms across Britain are becoming more multicultural with one in six youngsters in Primary Schools not having English as a first language
The number of children who count English as their mother tongue are now in the minority at more than 1,600 schools across England.
The new figures show that close to one million children who now attend schools in England do not have English as their first language at home – with the multicultural effects of migration now showing in the nation’s classrooms.
And the amount of schools with a majority of pupils who do not class English at their home language is steadily increasing by one a week.
There are 97 schools where children with English as their first language are in such a minority that they make up less than one in twenty pupils.
The statistics released by the Department of Education shows that in 1997, when Tony Blair first came to power, there were 866 schools in England where more than 50 per cent of the pupils had English as a second language.
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