Lord Tebbit – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Tebbit on 2014-03-11.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is the total yearly extra cost to schools of educating children whose first language is not English.

Lord Nash

We do not collect this data centrally. It is for individual schools to decide how much extra they choose to spend on educating pupils whose first language is not English.

Through their local funding formulas, local authorities may allocate funding to schools on the basis of the number of pupils in the school who speak English as an additional language and entered the state school system in the past three years. Local authorities allocated £233 million in this way in 2013-14. The funding is not ring-fenced within a school’s budget so this figure may not be a reliable indicator of actual spending.