Immigration Damaging Education

Home Office figures show that 4,200 children were brought from the Eastern Europe to Britain by their parents in the first three months of this year, or 65 every school day. Schools have no option but to devote thousands of pounds and hundreds of hours to attempt to bring the immigrants up to the same standard as British children. The result of this is devastating of the education system.

David Green, director of the Civitas think-tank, said last night: "We do not have the capacity to cope with these numbers, but it is not possible to stop people from coming, so schools have to do the best they can. This must be having a detrimental effect on schools. We have seen in London that, where there are a lot of non-English speakers, the standards are very low."

Initially the influx of Eastern Europeans was mainly adults however due to the offering of free education as well as generous child tax credits significant numbers of young children are now arriving for the first time.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: "The Government originally estimated that no more than 15,000 would come from the new Eastern European members of the EU. At least 600,000 came. Britain benefits economically from immigration, but not all or any immigration. There must be a limit to the amount of people who can come here, bearing in mind the ability of our public services and infrastructure to cope with new arrivals."

The entire position relating to immigration needs to be revised. It is bitterly unfair to British children to have the level of education they received degraded due to the amount of funds and time being spent on immigrants.