Ask most nurseries about how they overcome the language barrier with parents who speak little English, and they are surprisingly sanguine about the challenges. As one nursery manager says, ‘The aim is to settle in new children and ensure a happy time at nursery, so we just get on with it.’
It’s a barrier that settings are coming across more and more. The number of school pupils who speak a foreign language at home has risen by 20 per cent in five years, while according to latest statistics from the National Association for Language Development in the Curriculum, there are currently more than a million children between the ages of five and 16 in UK schools who speak more than 360 languages between them.
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