Nearly half of all primary school pupils in Birmingham don’t speak English as their mother tongue. Official figures reveal that at the start of this year, 44% of pupils - 39,112 out of a total of 90,919 - were from a home with a different primary language.
The percentage has risen from 43% in January 2016. It has also been going up - at a sharper rate - in other parts of the region. In Solihull primary schools, 9.9% did not speak English as a first language as of January 2017. That is up from 7.8% in January 2016 - the fastest increase in the country. In Wolverhampton, 28.8% of primary-aged pupils don’t speak English as a first language, up from 27.2% last year.
Nationally, 20.6% of pupils - 771,083 out of 3.7m - don’t speak English as a first language.
That works is a rise of 0.5 percentage points compared to January 2016, when the number of pupils speaking a foreign language at home was 734,355 out of 3.6m, or 20.1%.
A pupil is recorded as having English as an additional language if they are exposed to a language at home that is known or believed to be other than English.
The Department for Education says this not necessarily a measure of English language proficiency - since people can sometimes speak fluent English even when it is not the main language used at home - or a good way of gauging recent immigration.
