When I was in my teens, my mother decided to go to the local college to learn how to write. She had arrived in England in 1948 as a displaced Polish national with no English. She was figuratively and literally fresh off the boat - SS Arundel Castle - from Rhodesia via Cape Town, where she had spent the later war years.

Slowly, she learned to speak the language and to read a newspaper, but neither she nor my father could respond to any official correspondence or write to their children’s teachers. My sisters and I did all of that for them. Not being able to write deprived them both of their dignity and their privacy. My mother wanted to change that.

Today, in this country, more than 60 years later, there are hundreds of thousands of people like my parents. We berate them for not learning the language and for not fitting in, but we don’t make it easy for them.

A survey last month by the charity Refugee Action revealed that the waiting time for a place on a course for English speakers of other languages (Esol) was six months or more in nearly half of colleges; in extreme cases, it was three years.

Funding for these courses has dropped from £203 million in 2009-10 to just £90 million in 2015-16, pushing down participation while demand has continued to rise. The situation we find ourselves in now is described by Natecla, the organisation that represents Esol teachers, as being “the worst we can remember”.

It’s undoubtedly a problem when people living in this country do not have English language skills. But we should remember that it’s not only in their interests that they should acquire them; it’s in our interests, too.

‘Unlock people’s potential’

The most recent census showed that there were 138,000 people in the UK who spoke no English and a further 4 million whose first language was not English or Welsh. Many of these people will be in employment or looking for a job. And many of them will be living next door to you and me.

Former education secretary Nicky Morgan recognised this when she said that investing in Esol classes “will unlock people’s potential to work, volunteer, socialise with their neighbours, and make a full and active contribution to society”.

Importantly, many immigrants will also have children in education. There are more than 1.3 million pupils speaking English as an additional language in our schools. When I was at school, EAL went unrecognised but today, these children are provided for: £404 million has been allocated under the new national funding formula to help them.

Support at school is vital for these children, but support for their mothers and fathers is equally important. If parents are struggling to access services, their own health and that of their children may suffer. Acquiring the cultural capital and cultural literacy needed to navigate their environment is made so much harder if they can’t read a newspaper or search the internet. And trying to help children to do and understand their homework is often a hopeless and humiliating exercise.

But help the parent and you help the child - there is a “sound correlation between the improvement of parents’ English language with the literacy progress made by their children in school”, according to one report.

If we want immigrant children to succeed educationally, we need their parents to succeed, too. It’s as simple as that. Just ask my mother.

@AnnMroz