Schools are pocketing up to £700,000 each to teach pupils who don’t speak English as their first language as bill hits all-time high of £572million

Schools are forking out up to £700,000 each to teach students whose first language is not English, the Daily Mail revealed today.

Two schools, one in Manchester and the other in Northampton, have raised at least £500,000 this year to pay for translators, bilingual teaching assistants and support materials, according to Department for Education figures.

The funding is not ring-fenced and is instead included in the school’s overall budget, with councils saying it can be spent on ‘almost anything’.

Nationally, schools received a record £539 million this year for students using English ‘as an additional language’ (EAL).

Figures for the 2026-27 academic year show this figure will rise to £572 million. Costs are expected to rise by £157 million since modern records began in 2020.

Critics have expressed outrage at the rising cost to taxpayers fueled by immigration reaching all-time highs.

Separate DfE statistics show that English is no longer the first language of most students in some parts of the country. For example, two-thirds of children in Newham, east London, speak another home language.

Chris McGovern, of the right-wing pressure group Campaign for Real Education, said policymakers should stop focusing on ‘poor immigrants’.

He told the Daily Mail: ‘Stop feeling sorry for them, we’re too obsessed with it and we don’t need to worry about them; We need to worry about white working class kids.

‘Of course, children who do not have the necessary English language skills need to be assimilated, spending time and money, but this must happen before they enter the school system.’

Other campaigners called for the funding to be explicitly directed to white working-class children, saying they were being ignored and left behind.

Only one in five working-class white students achieve a good pass in English and maths, compared to 45.4 per cent across all demographic groups.

Mr McGovern said one or two special centers or destination schools should be established within each local authority to provide pre-school English courses to struggling children.

He added: ‘If there is money around, we have consistent and clear year-on-year evidence that it is white working-class children who perform worse and need numeracy and literacy support.

‘Lack of imagination is the biggest problem in the education world, but however we deal with it, we need to focus on the right group; ‘Do not pity immigrants, they are the biggest success story of the education system.’

DfE bosses define EAL as where students ‘are exposed to a language other than English during early development and continue to be exposed to that language at home or in the community’.

A person born in Britain may still speak English as an additional language, and children classified as EAL may still be proficient in English.

According to the 2024/25 school census, English is not the first language of 1.8 million students across the country, or one in five. This figure rose to 1.2 million a decade ago.

Schools receive extra money for EAL students under the national funding formula, which in turn supports them with the higher costs associated with educating these students. Local authorities then distribute the funds within their borders.

The algorithm also distributes cash to schools based on the number of students with special needs and deprivation.

Manchester Academy, a secondary school in the crime-ridden suburb of Moss Side, received more than £670,000 from EAL funding for 2025/26; This figure is more than any other school.

Northampton International Academy (£517,287) and St Claudine’s Catholic Girls’ School in Brent, north London (£459,659) round out the top three.

Schools across the country received an average of £27,418, or around £320 per non-native English student.

Most of the expenses go to teachers who specialize in teaching English to foreign children, bilingual assistants and even translators at parent-teacher conferences.

Online job postings seek translators who can speak languages ​​such as Romanian, Arabic and Polish fluently.

Nearly 2,000 schools will not show funding figures, according to a Daily Mail audit.

Of these, around 1,700 did not receive any EAL funding from their local authority; the rest merged into new multi-academy foundations, creating new identification numbers that cannot be compared over time.

The findings come after the Daily Mail last year showed that English is not the first language for the majority of pupils in more than 2,000 schools across the country.

There was not a single child in the two schools whose native language was English.

The investigation has raised critics’ concerns that speaking many different languages ​​can be incredibly disruptive to learning and integration.

Teachers have previously said schools are under increasing pressure due to mass migration and called on ministers to provide schools with the necessary funding to cope with the different languages ​​spoken by pupils.

Ofsted’s new ranking system includes EAL provision features.

A Department for Education spokesman said: ‘Every child deserves a high-quality education, including children who speak English as an additional language.

‘We trust schools who know their students best to decide how to invest their funds to support every child while getting the best value for money from public resources.

‘It is the mission of this Government to break the link between past and success and to halve the disadvantaged gap of this generation so that every child can achieve and develop.

The measures in the ‘Schools White Paper’ will do this; These include Mission North East and Mission Coastal, which will improve outcomes for white working-class children and disadvantaged communities, as well as plans to radically reform the way disadvantaged schools are funded.’