Immigrant children, indigenous children and our scarily depleting numbers of teachers: losers all, as new figures show a record 800,000 pupils who do not speak English as a first language. In some boroughs as many as three quarters of primary school children cannot cope with standard learning unless afforded extra help with the rudiments of conversation - miserable for them, frustrating for the native English speakers thus slowed down and exhausting for those charged with the care of both.

There is no reason to suppose the ignorance of English is about the fecklessness of migrant parents; from personal experience, quite the reverse. One Bulgarian friend, intent on the best for her four-year-old, has her perfectly dressed, beautifully mannered and bright as a button. Still, she and her husband refuse to use a word of English at home because (and I find this achingly sad) they fear that should the child copy her parents' fluent but accented speech, she will be bullied for it. Better by far, they agree - even though I forcefully don't - that when she learns, she learns “properly”.

Meanwhile, cannier middle-class British parents are lining up to take advantage of government-funded preschool education, now an entitlement for all three and four-year-olds in England and Wales for between 12 and 15 hours a week. Never mind that the UK already chucks its children into formal education years before almost any country in Europe - only Malta and the Netherlands share our compulsory age of 5 - and never mind that many developmental experts are cautioning that this is too young; those desperate for childcare are clinging to preschool education for, basically, babysitting.

This is nuts. Our childcare facilities are indeed dire, but that is a separate issue and better dealt with by, say, tax breaks, than by using up the time of qualified teachers. Their services could be put to greater use - not least to the “proper” teaching of “proper” English to those who need and, by and large, want it (though if, for some doubters, it has to be mandatory, then so be it).

If the resources are there to host three and four-year-olds, let them be targeted solely where they can pre-empt a crisis at big school; scoop up the little Bulgarians and Poles and Asians; forget about tests and scores and structured lessons; wrap them in armfuls of games and jokes and songs and films and anything it takes for them to be more wondrous than their mother ever was with the dawning realisation that a chaise is also a chair. And if that gentle induction isn't radical enough to ensure a level playing field for primary-school intakes, when both Christopher and Kostadin reach the grand old age of 5, try this for size: make the mothers, often equally isolated by tongue, go too.

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