Examination of Witnesses (Questions 333
- 339)
TUESDAY 27 NOVEMBER 2007
Dr Janet Dobson, Mr Steve Sinnott and Mr Mick Brookes
Q333 Chairman:
Good afternoon and thank you very much for coming along and helping
us with our inquiry. I saw you sitting there, so you will know
that at the beginning I say, will you please speak up and speak
clearly so we get a good and accurate record of what you have
to say. I wonder, as you come from slightly different parts of
the world, whether you might just introduce yourselves across
the table. Do you want to make anything in the way of an opening
statement or shall we go straight into the questions? Straight
into the questions. But you might just say, each one, who you
are, so we know where we are.
Mr Sinnott: I am Steve Sinnott and I am General
Secretary of the National Union of Teachers.
Dr Dobson: I am Janet Dobson and I am a Senior
Research Fellow at the Migration Research Unit, University College
London. I have previously worked in a local education authority.
Mr Brookes: I am Mick Brookes. I am General
Secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers and I was
myself a head teacher for 27 years.
Q334 Chairman:
Thank you very much. May I start off the questioning? What is
the proportion of migrants amongst school teachers in the United
Kingdom? In what subjects and at what levels of education is the
proportion of migrants particularly high and why? Do you expect
this to change in the future?
Mr Sinnott: I should also have said I was convener
too of the Commonwealth Teachers' Group organisations that are
affiliated to Education International. The first thing, in trying
to answer that question, is to say that there is a shortage of
data in that area. What data exist come from a variety of sources,
all of them inadequate in being able to give a full answer to
the question. There is data for the period from 2001 onwards but
it only relates to approved UK work permits. This shows a decline
in the number of work permits that have been issued for teachers
during that period. Further data relates to the qualifications
of teachers. This data comes from a piece of research that the
National Union of Teachers and the Commonwealth Teachers' Group
were involved in and it is based upon a relatively small sample.
It shows that, amongst the Commonwealth countries that participated
in this survey, the UK was recruiting perhaps fewer highly qualified
teachers from across the Commonwealth compared with Australia
and New Zealand, for example. Data in this area is very patchy.
Dr Dobson: I said before I came that this was
not a subject on which I have any expertise. The only thing I
would say is that it is quite difficult to produce information
on the achievements of young migrants because schools collect
statistics on ethnicity and on language but not on country of
birth. Without information on country of birth, you cannot then
produce this sort of information.
Mr Brookes: Goal one for the British Council
is to improve the accreditation of qualifications from people
from all sorts of different countries. Clearly with the influx
of children from eastern Europe, it would be good to see those
qualifications accredited so we could see a growth in the number
of teachers who were migrant teachers.
Q335 Lord Paul:
Do you have any estimates of the changing proportions of migrant
pupils in the total number of children at school in the UK? Is
there significant variation across regions and between different
types of schools?
Dr Dobson: I would like to try to answer this
though not exactly in the terms that you have asked. Because there
is no data on country of birth for pupils, then there is no obvious
source to provide an answer from. I have been looking at information
on flows of migrants which is quite interesting and it is essential,
if we are going to discuss this topic, to have this sort of broad
overview. In my submission I included some figures from the international
passenger survey. That is a survey where the figures for particular
years have a wide margin of error for statistical reasons. There
are two interesting things about it. Firstly, it shows that over
a very long period UK schools have been taking in substantial
numbers of children from overseas, so it is something which is
not new, we have been doing it for 50 years. If you were as ancient
as I, you would be able to remember children coming from the Caribbean,
large numbers of children coming from the Indian sub-continent,
and so it has gone on. The other thing that is interesting about
these statistics is that it does seem to show that since the mid-1990s,
there has been a trend of increase in numbers coming in and a
trend of decrease in numbers going out. So cumulatively we are
going to have in our schools more children who were born overseas
and that is obviously going to have implications for resourcing
of things like English as an additional language. I wonder whether
you would be interested if I were to say something specifically
about numbers coming from eastern Europe. The short answer is
that there is no hard data but I was rather astonished to read
in the Sunday papers that there are hundreds of thousands going
into schools, so I rang up the person from whom this information
had been obtained, a perfectly reputable researcher, and apparently
the statistics that were being drawn upon were worked out in a
rather convoluted way from the labourforce survey for children
and young people aged nought to 19. So it is quite likely that
the majority of that number are in the age group 17-19 and those
that are not, maybe a third, would be under five and the numbers
of school age children cannot possibly be deduced from the figure
which was in the newspaper. Then we come on to how we find out.
If you look at the most recent accession monitoring report covering
the period up to September 2007, only five per cent of those on
the workers' registration scheme had dependents under 17 with
them when they registered, and the number of dependents under
17 living with people on the scheme in the UK at that point was
42,105. That sounds great—now we have a figure and it is
42,000—but actually that is at the point they registered.
Since they registered, they may have brought their children in,
some of them may have gone back to the A8 countries and taken
their children with them, self-employed are not on the workers'
registration scheme anyway, and some of the people who are now
on the scheme were already in the UK before and their children
may previously have been in UK schools. All that figure indicates
to me is that it is likely that the true figure has five figures
and not six figures. We are not talking about hundreds of thousands.
To try to get a bit more of a handle on it, so we know what we
are talking about, I looked at some of the local authority statistics
that they have collected and Slough, which has had a very high
profile in campaigning for more resources, had 258 children from
Poland going into their schools in the 18 months before last January,
seven from Latvia, six from Lithuania, and six from Romania. I
can quite see that for them it is a real problem finding places
for those children but you have to have an awful lot of 258s to
make it up to several hundred thousand. Whilst there are important
issues for schools about recent immigration from eastern Europe,
we must keep a sense of proportion. Just to finish, we must also
remember that the numbers are likely to increase as children join
parents who have found work here and as people get married or
whatever and have families.
Mr Brookes: I have heard three times now that
we do not actually know how many children there are, so the first
thing I would say is that we need to find out, in order to make
sure that the resources are available for these children coming
into our schools; this could be a reasonably simple exercise.
Let us ask the schools about how many there are. There have been
significant numbers of children and young people coming into our
schools, not just from eastern Europe, and we need to broaden
this out so it is not just eastern Europe we are talking about.
The phenomenon that we have picked up over the past week or so
is that whereas usually these children are coming into city areas
where there is an infrastructure set up to look after them, quite
often, and particularly from the eastern European block, children
are coming into rural areas; Lincolnshire has been mentioned in
the press over the past few days. Rural areas have two disadvantages
in the capacity to deal with a large influx of children. One is
that they tend to be amongst the lowest funded of the local authorities
and compared with city authorities their amount of money per pupil
is far less. Secondly, they do not have the same infrastructure
that there is, say, available for children and young people in
London. My friend who teaches in a school not a few miles from
here has 46 different languages in his school and he is very happy
about that, but I believe the shock of numbers of children coming
into small rural primary schools, for instance, must be properly
assessed. We need to find out exactly how many there are and then
we will know whether the resources are adequate.
Mr Sinnott: There are some figures available
in relation to pupils whose first language is known or believed
to be that other than English and it is available in relation
to England with some of the provisos that Janet was talking about.
What the figures show between the years 2003 and 2007 for England
is that the percentage of youngsters whose first language was
known or believed to be other than English had increased from
9.7 per cent in 2003 to 12 per cent by 2007. That is quite a significant
increase and perhaps there are some ways in which we can speculate
when that increase occurred and where the youngsters were most
likely to come from. In the National Union of Teachers too, what
we did during the course of 2006 was, working with the National
Association for Language Development in the Curriculum (NALDIC),
to conduct a survey of 170 local authorities, of 500 of our head
teacher members and a number of teachers who work in the area
of ethnic minority achievement. What they were saying was that,
for them, they believed that, within the past 18 months prior
to 2006 94 per cent of the respondents from local authorities
reported that there had been an increase in English as an additional
language needs or indeed in ethnic minority achievement needs
in that 18-month period. Amongst the head teachers, 55 per cent
were indicating that within their schools, there had been an increase
in ethnic minority achievement needs.
Q336 Lord Turner of Ecchinswell:
May I ask another question which is related to that? We were talking
about how many migrant children there are in school as one measure
of the extra resources required but can you comment upon how much
extra it costs to deal with either a migrant child or a child
whose first language is not English, whether they are migrant
or not, because the data would presumably come in that fashion?
What do we know about what we think the resource implications
are? Whatever the figures are, if the figure is 70,000, what do
we then have to multiply it by to work out the resource implications
of it?
Mr Brookes: It depends upon the child. If you
have a child who has a rudimentary understanding of English but
is also a refugee child, it may well be that that child is coming
into this country and into school in this country having witnessed
untold horrors. Therefore the cost of properly making sure that
that child is looked after is very high in terms of counselling,
in terms of having personal support in school and of course having
English as a second language, making sure that they have got that
support. There will be other children who are coming into school
who already have a reasonable command of English and so the cost
there will be the cost of any child coming into school, bearing
in mind that there is going to be a culture shock for the child
in coming into a totally different community and there is a variation
between them. Bearing in mind that £1,000 per child will
buy you only slightly more than three weeks' teaching assistant
support, we need to bear in mind the overall figure of EMAG money,
which I believe is set to rise to £187.6 million in 2008,
and a fairly simple sum could be devised by looking at amounts
per pupil.
Q337 Lord Turner of Ecchinswell:
Is that figure, this ethnic minority achievement of grant, as
it is allocated to schools or local authorities or regions, based
on a per capita amount? Underlying where that figure comes from,
is somebody making a per capita assumption?
Mr Brookes: We need to make sure that that amount
of money is both adequate but also that it is targeted properly.
So I come back to our observations about rural areas: is the EMAG
money coming through into those rural areas? Is there access from
schools for that money? We need to make sure it is properly targeted;
we need to make sure the quantum is right.
Q338 Lord Turner of Ecchinswell:
I am asking very specifically whether at the moment, in terms
of the way that money gets divided up, it is divided on a proportional
to number of people basis. Is that the matrix?
Dr Dobson: Do you mean at government level or
local authority level?
Q339 Lord Turner of Ecchinswell:
Within the Government down to local authorities and within local
authorities down to schools? Does somebody have an assumption
that it is X thousand per child and they count the children or
is that just not there?
Dr Dobson: I do not know whether my colleagues
know. I telephoned someone in a local authority yesterday to see
whether they could illuminate it and they said they did not know.
It was very opaque; some authorities this year seem to have got
more, some the same and some less and they are not sure why. Somebody
in the relevant government department must know.
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