Nearly one in three children in Glasgow doesn’t speak English as first language. Figures fuel growing concerns about capacity of ‘Britain’s asylum capital’ to cope with influx of new arrivals

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/12/01/nearly-third-children-glasgow-dont-speak-english/

Posted by Make_the_music_stop

42 comments

  2. Mate – we’ve got 3rd/4th generation Asians who will be speaking urdu etc. on the phone before then speaking to you with a thick scottish accent.

    I guess, what I’m trying to say is: we’ve always been melting pot; you bam.

  3. A meaningless statistic unless you know how good their English is. If my children speak Spanish at home, but can speak perfect English too – what exactly is the problem?

  4. Terrible. If the SNP keeps supporting this, Reform will end up winning Scotland too.

  6. It doesn’t say how well they speak English though.

    Still, at least the usual crowd get over excited and angry

  7. In my kids’ school, most of those kids who have English as a second language are “white” Europeans. For example, for my little one, she has friends who have parents from Germany, Ukraine, Spain, and Italy.

    Should we be including them with these “concerns”? Doesn’t help I’ve seen protests about adults learning English in community learning centres.

  8. I remember an article gushing over one of the Royal sprogs speaking another language and it making them a genius 

    But it’s different when Toffs do it right?

  9. OK, if you actually look at the breakdown of the data, more than 75% of those children have an attainment of “competent” or above, which actually seems pretty good.

  10. I think it’s clear that in the UK, English is eventually just going to be the Lingua franca.

  11. First language doesnt mean its not a fluent second language. Purposely misleading statistics

  12. The funny thing is that most people with “growing concerns” are too stupid to figure out who and what they really should be concerned about.

  13. So over two thirds of children in Glasgow speak English as their first language.

  14. This is madness as someone who went to a Scottish high school 15 years ago. Every single person was Scottish bar two Pakistani families and they spoke English extremely well. A school of over 1000 pupils. How can it change so quickly ?

  15. Have a look at how the stats are collected. If you specify another language is spoken at home then your kids are automatically down as ‘English as a second language’, regardless of how well they speak it. In any such survey my kids would be ‘English as a second language’ cos my missis speaks spanish, even tho the kids main (and first) language is English.

  16. So 2 in 3 children do have English as a first language then?

  20. Glaswegian can be tricky to understand, but pretty sure it’s still a dialect of English.

  23. “first language”

    You mean that they’re multi lingual and don’t JUST speak English

  24. “Children and young people who have *always lived* in Glasgow but use a language other than English at home” are eligible to use the EAL scheme.

    From the Glasgow council website “The term does not imply an *equal or specified level of fluency* in two or more languages. In Glasgow *a minority* of
    bilingual and multi-lingual learners are new arrivals to the UK.”

    The diversity of languages in Glasgow schools is nothing new either: “Across our schools 160 different languages are spoken with the five main languages spoken after English being Urdu, Arabic, Polish, Punjabi and Chinese(Modern Standard, Mandarin).”

    [2024 report](https://onlineservices.glasgow.gov.uk/councillorsandcommittees/viewSelectedDocument.asp?c=P62AFQDN81UTZ30GNT)

  26. Oh I thought the traitorgraph had switched to demonising people on benefits. I guess they have gone back to their usual shit stirring over people that foreign. I mean do they just not like foreign people.

    last time the traitorgraph pushed all this xenophobia we got brexit and that has cost the country billions of pounds causing strong upward pressure on inflation, resulting in the boris wave and the pressure to increase taxes to cover the lost revenue. Im not too sure I would pay much attention to what propoganda leaflets like the telegraph has to say as it just costs the nation a lot and makes the place much worse. Like I said the traitorgraph.

  30. Meh. Something like 3/4 kids in north and mid Wales don’t speak English as a first language and about half don’t get educated at English speaking schools either.

  31. Off-Topic, Why did the telegraph choose a picture like this for a post about this??

  32. Genuinely thought this was about the Scottish throwing off the shackles of colonisation. Braveheart-esque

  34. Isn’t it supposed to be “Nearly one in three children in Glasgow don’t speak English as a first language”? Because the audience is contextually “they”?

    Am I Englishing wrong?

  35. That’s racist! Most English speakers can understand 80% of what a [sober] Glaswegian says.

  36. “As first language!” This would include Farages children too, their first language would be German. Doesn’t mean they can’t speak English

  37. “as first language” doesn’t mean they don’t speak english lol……

  39. Quoting the article,

    This category covers pupils who are new to English and still developing competence and fluency.

    The word ‘covers’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. In this group, there will also be children, presumably, whose English is better than their other language.

    This is just a clever way to rubbish multilingualism. However multilingualism is a good defence against dementia, so what should we conclude?

  40. People outside England aren’t speaking English? I’m speechless

  42. Reminder English might not be your first language, but you can still speak it fluently as a second.

    Ask a lot of kids what their first language is, and they will answer with the one that they mostly speak to their parents, before then saying six seven and telling you to “now fuck off, nonce”.

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