Steve McCormack: Schools can't cope with all these languages

A strange thing happened to me recently when I did a day of supply teaching at a central London comprehensive. I found myself, for four of the six lessons of the day, teaching Bengali. I've had some strange tasks thrown at me as a supply teacher over the years: an all-girls' PE lesson and improvised drama in a windowless studio. But never have I been taken so far outside my comfort zone as with the Bengali classes.

Fortunately, the teacher I was replacing had left worksheets for me to hand out, and clear instructions on what each class should be getting on with. So I wasn't expected, of course, to actually do any teaching of Bengali myself, but simply to supervise classes as they worked on improving their written skills in a language that most, to a greater or lesser extent, were comfortable with in the spoken form. And the lessons passed uneventfully.

It just so happened that, on the same day, in a science lesson I was covering, I was confronted with another linguistic challenge. A girl at the front was giving me worryingly blank looks as I asked her questions about what she was doing. "She doesn't speak any English," I was told by her neighbour, herself addressing me in semi-broken, but nevertheless, English.

It's worth, for a moment, dwelling on the backgrounds of these two girls, sharing a desk in a GCSE science classroom in a London comprehensive, because they illustrate powerfully the degree to which immigration is making life more complicated and time-consuming for teachers.

The first girl, whose family's roots lay in sub-Saharan Africa, had spent her most recent years in Italy, so she spoke and understood, as far as European languages are concerned, only Italian. Her arrival in the UK was so recent that her English was almost non-existent. Her neighbour had lived in London for several years and had a smattering of Italian, picked up during childhood in her native Somalia, where the Italian colonisation of the 19th and 20th centuries has left its linguistic residue. So the two girls were able to communicate with each other in a form of Italian, with the Somali girl acting as interpreter between me and her new friend.

Although an extreme example, in essence there's nothing unusual about this these days. For the past few years, I have found myself negotiating this type of language obstacle-course in most London schools that I teach in.

Across the country, teachers encounter immigrant children, from every corner of the world, whose English is, at best, very weak. And these come on top of the still shockingly large numbers of children from white, working-class, families with reading and writing skills so poor that they struggle with even the most basic secondary-school textbooks.

Together, these indigenous, and immigrant, children form a large proportion of the school population. I heard a jaw-dropping statistic from the platform of a recent conference about the new Diplomas recently. One in six school-leavers can't read or write properly. The figure came from the Leitch report on skills published 18 months ago.

Now let's consider this reality, together with the lessons in Bengali. These, too, are representative of a growing trend – of state schools devoting time and resources to what are called "community languages". They are the tongues spoken in the homes of immigrant families, but usually not mastered in a formal way by the children. There are currently 35 of them, including Turkish, Russian, Chinese and Somali, being given lesson time in schools, on top of whatever "main" foreign language is taught to all children as part of the national curriculum. Ofsted recently called for more spending on the teaching of these community languages, an idea heartily supported by CILT, the Government-funded National Centre for Languages.

But should we be doing any of this? I don't think so. As a language graduate myself, and one who has worked abroad a fair bit, I'm all for these children keeping in touch with their home cultures and honing their linguistic skills.

But this should be laid on by the communities themselves, which is, in fact, the case in many instances. I know a school in London that rents its classrooms out on Saturday mornings to the Russian community for just these sorts of lessons, and some Catholic churches have, for decades, run Polish-language lessons on Sunday mornings after mass for second-generation Poles. Fine!

Perhaps one day our state schools will be functioning so well that we will be able fund this from the public purse. But while we're still struggling to teach our children English in their schools, then community languages represent a luxury we can't afford.

The writer is a supply teacher working in several London schools