Schools are struggling to cope with an influx of students from abroad, with many teachers facing classes in which a third of pupils do not speak English as their first language, teachers’ representatives said yesterday.

The number of pupils who did not have English as their mother tongue had risen by 66,000 in a year, the conference of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers was told.

This could cause difficulties for teachers who did not always have the resources and training to provide the support that youngsters needed to integrate into the school system and to thrive academically. In some instances it could result in very bright children who spoke up to six languages – but not English – being placed in bottom sets for academic subjects in which they would otherwise excel.

Joy Barrett, of the ethnic minority achievement service in Oxfordshire, said that some schools had to cope with pupils who between them spoke dozens of different languages. Often they arrived as teenagers and were put straight into GCSE classes even though they spoke no English.

Stephen Holmes, a delegate from Coundon Court School in Coventry, said that falling pupil numbers in primary schools in his area had been reversed with the arrival of 4,000 children of immigrant families in six years.If teachers were lucky, they got an extra four hours of support from language specialists every week.

The conference called for “additional government funding to meet the extra educational demands on schools brought about by the recent influx of children of refugee and EU migrant families”.

More than 13 per cent pupils in primary schools and 10.5 per cent in secondaries in England do not have English as their first language. This rises to 53 per cent in Central London. The Government has said that English should be the main language of teaching in schools.

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