Theme: PolandEditorial
This edition of the Race Equality Newsletter takes Poland and the arrival of Polish young people as its main theme. For many of us the arrival of so many children & young people from Poland in the past two years has been a joy and a challenge. There are now about 400 Polish pupils in the county's schools. They are in a sense representative of the demographic change we are seeing in Gloucestershire as well as other areas in the South-West. Within a couple of years, Polish pupils may well become the largest foreign language group in our schools. Currently it is British born speakers of Gujarati. There is no slowdown in the number of pupils arriving from abroad. There were just over 300 last year. In September alone this academic year we received 200 more, mostly from Poland and other areas of new EU accession states. To have bilingual pupils in Gloucestershire schools is now a norm and something that schools have to take into account in their planning. Although the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) population in Gloucestershire schools is still only 3.5% compared to 19% as a national average, an increasing number of schools across the county have bilingual pupils. In the last academic year READS supported pupils in 55% of the secondary schools and 30% of the primaries. There are four interwoven challenges: How do we make pupils welcome, how do we support their acquisition of English, how do we build on their prior knowledge to promote achievement and how do we build community cohesion? A fifth challenge is to ensure pupils are encouraged to maintain, develop and celebrate their Home Language. Doing that supports their cognitive development and of course a number of young people may return to their country of origin after a period in the UK. Community cohesion is high on the agenda for schools and the need to promote it in schools is driven as much by new immigration as it is by a growing perception of a rift in society between rich & poor and issues around Britishness and the established BME communities. How we work in schools with Polish children as the numbers grow will be a measure of our success. We should be actively responding to a changing population and be preparing staff and pupils for the arrival of young people from abroad. We should assume that pupils from abroad will be the norm not the exception and therefore, challenging as it is, we have to embrace it. I hope that in this edition of the Race Equality Newsletter you will find something of interest to help you in your present or future work with newly arrived pupils. Giles Diggle READS Manager
The Department for Schools, Children and Families, Guidance on the Duty to Promote Community Cohesion, 2007
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