Cambridgeshire is an increasingly diverse county, in terms of culture, lifestyle, ethnicity and language. We welcome this diversity and regard it as an opportunity to enrich the learning and experiences of all our children and young people. BME and Traveller children comprise approximately 12% of Cambridgeshire’s total school population, with Bangladeshi, Chinese and Indian as the largest groups at 0.7%, 0.6% and 0.8% respectively. The total black population in schools is 0.8%, which includes Black Caribbean and Black African children and those who identify as ‘Black other’.
The majority of our minority ethnic children and young people attend schools and childcare settings with a mainly white population. It is essential, therefore, to build capacity within schools and childcare settings themselves so that they have the necessary skills, knowledge and understanding to support these children and young people.
There are more BME and Traveller children currently in primary schools than in secondary schools and the composition varies greatly across the county: 17.5% of Cambridge City’s school population are from BME and Traveller communities, compared with 2.5% in Fenland. However, BME communities are growing in all areas of the county.
The various Traveller communities comprise the county’s largest minority group. However, identification of Traveller children is problematic for many reasons. The term ‘Traveller’ is broader than the existing ethnic categories of Gypsy/Roma and Traveller of Irish Heritage, so that the numbers of children recorded by the annual school census in the above categories is far fewer than the number of Traveller children, including Showmen children and others who do not belong to these ethnic categories, recorded in schools. The total of school age Traveller children residing in Cambridgeshire, but not necessarily on any school roll, is known to be even higher.
Over 100 languages are spoken in Cambridgeshire and the main and relatively established community languages are Bengali (Sylheti dialect), Cantonese, Hindi, Gujarat, Punjabi, Urdu and Vietnamese. New communities speaking languages other than English are growing in areas with traditionally less linguistic diversity. There are increasing numbers of Portuguese, Polish and Lithuanian speakers in Fenland and East Cambridgeshire, and Tagalog and Malayalam speakers in areas around the hospitals. As a result, there are growing numbers of children new to English in Cambridgeshire schools and childcare settings and the overall percentage of bilingual children is increasing across the county.
