One in eight language support staff will have lost their jobs by the end of this financial year thanks to cuts in Section 11 funding, according to the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and the Commission for Racial Equality.
They claim the cuts are already undermining a strikingly successful educational initiative and have called on the Government to protect money for support schemes.
The Home Office grants for helping immigrant children learn English have been progressively cut since 1992 and now account for only half the total cost of local authority support projects. They previously covered 75 per cent.
Inner-city areas face a potentially greater loss because Section 11 money has been abolished. English teaching projects will now have to bid for a share of the Single Regeneration Budget.
The union and the CRE estimate that around 8,300 teaching and non-teaching jobs are supported by Section 11. The money is vital to authorities such as Bradford where it supports more than 10 per cent of the LEA workforce.
“Despite the best efforts of some LEAs to step in and maintain funding, the survey shows that there has already been a serious deterioration in standards in some areas,” said the ATL. “The funds now committed specifically to Section 11 projects are quite clearly insufficient.”
The CRE has been monitoring the progress of bids for Single Regeneration Budget money. The councils which have so far failed in an attempt to pay for language support work with the SRB so far include: Bradford, Bolton, Manchester, Leicester, Islington, Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea and Birmingham.
* The Government will soon be publishing a consultation document on the uses of ethnic monitoring in schools, according to junior education minister Robin Squire.
He was responding to questioners at last week’s CRETES Managing Equality of Opportunity conference who were concerned at the Government’s apparent failure to use the ethnic data collected by schools and local authorities for the past five years.
Warwickshire’s chief education officer Margaret Maden, one of the speakers at the conference,was particularly critical. “It’s disgraceful that despite an enormous amount of effort at a local level we haven’t been able to see what it’s about. The figures have just disappeared into a great black hole.”
* The abolition of Section 11 money in urban areas could see a rush of legal actions to obtain educational help through the special needs system, according to a letter to the Department for Education from the CRE and the Independent Panel for Special Educational Advice (IPSEA).
At present, language needs do not count as special needs in the school system (although they do count under further education rules). John Wright of the IPSEA said that the DFE could be in breach of the 1976 Race Relations Act if it leaves minority pupils without language support and then continues to deny help from special needs funds.
