The 2,000 Schools Where More Than Half of Pupils Don’t Speak English as Their First Language

English is no longer the first language for the majority of pupils at more than 2,000 schools, MailOnline can today reveal.

No children at two primary schools – one in Tower Hamlets and another in Kirklees, West Yorkshire – have English as their mother tongue.

Our statistics, obtained exclusively under Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, show nine in ten pupils don’t speak only English at home at 107 schools.

The full results of our audit, covering all 22,000 state schools, can be viewed in our search tool below.

Bengali is the mother tongue of 92 per cent of the pupils at Kobi Nazrul, the primary school in Tower Hamlets where none of the kids solely speak English at home. The others speak a slew of other languages, including Indonesian and Urdu.

At Pentland Infant in Dewsbury – the Kirklees school – the overwhelming majority of the children speak either Gujarati (36 per cent) or Panjabi (45 per cent).

When broken down by languages, our FOI revealed Tottenhall Infant School, Enfield had the highest rate of Albanian speakers at 18 per cent.

Sheffield’s Netherthorpe Primary School topped the league table for Arabic (54 per cent), meanwhile Burnley Brow Community School in Oldham had the highest share of Bengali speakers (93 per cent).

In terms of Chinese, St Cecilia’s CofE Primary School in Wokingham, Berkshire, had the highest rate (28 per cent).

Polish speakers were most heavily concentrated at St Cuthbert’s Catholic Primary School in Windermere (43 per cent), while Urdu was most common at St Michael’s CofE Primary School in Bolton (58 per cent).

In total, English is no longer the first language for the majority of children at 2,039 schools. This includes deaf schools, where pupils’ first language is BSL.

Nationwide, English isn’t the first language of 1.8 million pupils, or one in five pupils.

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Ian Mansfield, head of education at Policy Exchange, said: ‘These statistics demonstrate the very real pressure that mass immigration places on public services.’

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