Almost one-in-10 students aged 15 across England, Northern Ireland and Wales speak a different language at home than the one they use at school, new data from the European Commission shows.
The Teaching Languages at School in Europe report, published last month, asked 15-year-old students if they mainly spoke a language at home that wasn’t the one they used at school. Across European countries in 2015, an average of 9 per cent of students reported that they spoke another language at home. In Scotland, however, the total was less than 5 per cent.
Malta is an example of a bilingual state; the EC reported that 87.7 per cent of the island’s 15-year-olds speak a language at home other than the language of schooling.
This is because English is the main language for teaching science and 84.4 per cent of pupils said they spoke Maltese at home. However, Maltese is also sometimes used in Malta’s classrooms.
In Poland, only 1.1 per cent of pupils spoke a language other than Polish at home, while in Hungary, 2.3 per cent of students didn’t speak the language they used at school at home.
