According to an article in yesterday's Financial Times,
The paper said:
I hope she is not disappointed. I read of one Albanian taxi driver in London who sends his child to a private school in Tirana to get a decent education.
After employment controls were lifted in January, the number of Romanians registering for UK national insurance increased sharply compared with the year before – from 18,000 to 100,000. The figure for Bulgarians rose from 10,000 to 30,000.
The paper said:
"One Romanian woman who recently moved to London from Italy said she and her husband had decided to come to the UK because friends had told them the schools were better."
I hope she is not disappointed. I read of one Albanian taxi driver in London who sends his child to a private school in Tirana to get a decent education.
I am perfectly sure that the great majority of Romanian immigrants coming to England are decent and
hard-working and have much to give, though as Rod Liddle pointed out, a small minority cause big problems. Romanians (and other Eastern Europeans) in the
main make great immigrants – they are Christian,
family-minded and conservative. They resemble the way the English were before the
1960s. We are lucky to have Eastern
Europe from which to draw immigrants, if we need immigrants – though I am not
convinced that we do and nor was a Select Committee of the House of
Lords that looked at the economic advantages of immigration.
However, we are in the EU and free movement of peoples is a
given. I hope that those who settle permanently (very many will) and become British subjects love the British tradition
and will learn to be proud that Wolfe took Quebec. Knowing Anglo-Romanians I think
they will. I mention Wolfe because when Churchill was
asked how to make children proud of being English he said
'Tell them Wolfe took Quebec.'The latest immigration figures in the UK, published yesterday, are startling. 583,000 people entered the UK to settle in the year to June. Only 228,000 were from the EU. This is despite the efforts of the Government to check immigration from outside the EU. This huge movement of people from the Third World not just to Britain but to Western Europe in general is the most important historical phenomenon of our times. I do not believe that it is inevitable, but nor do I expect it to be halted.
Great. I'm sure most of them are decent hard-working people who will enrich Britain enormously.
ReplyDeleteI expanded my blog post to respond to this point. Of course though Romanian immigrants are hard-working, church-going, etc., coming in large numbers they still make make our society less cohesive, less conservative, less traditional. As do foreigners like me who live in Romania. On the whole I think foreigners do rather a lot of good in Romania, although I am in two minds about how much I like Romania becoming Westernised. In some ways very valuable and beneficial, in others not.
DeleteI totally agree with your comment, and I am entitled to ,having experience in both educational system . I can say British schools have lower expectation than Romanian ones and I will give you just one example. I have a friend, he is a maths teacher in one of private High School somewhere in London ( before He worked in a public school and was disappointed about low expectation) and it was given to him mostly of A level classes because of his qualification and experience . Two months later some students complaint he speaks too much like an academic . Wait a minute, you chose to do an A level in Maths, what do you expect?
ReplyDeleteI don't know that I share your optimism when it comes to the British benefiting (?) from the conservative-mindedness of eastern European immigrants. I suspect that they and their customs will remain largely under the radar until they themselves assimilate after a generation or two. They are not great enough in number, nor do they have any sort of political agenda that would cause ripples in British culture.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, Olivia, I think you are right, though you are one exception to the rule. But this reservoir of Eastern Europeans does mean the countries of Western Europe could stop immigration from the Third World and still not lose any of what the politicians see as the economic advantages of accepting immigrants.
DeleteYou seem not to follow completely your source (FT). It reads: "According to official estimates, half of these registrations are from new arrivals, suggesting that some of those already in the UK had been working illegally."
ReplyDeleteSo, there was no influx of 100.000 Romanians within the last year. Actually, there were not even 50.000, but some 30-35000 persons, as data from the Office for National Statistics suggest: in the three months to September 2014 there was a netto increase of some 8000 Romanians from the previous quarter. Thus, for the four quarters of the year, we have some 30-35000 persons, not taking into account seasonal fluctuations (people come to work in the spring and return home in the autumn).
There are not more than 20-25000 Romanians who come yearly to the UK in order to stay for more than a year, of whom some 40% get back home after a couple of years.
As the recent electoral events impressively showed, the majority of the expat-Romanians are very bound to the homeland and only a minority are ready to assimilate into British subjects.
Why should Romanians in the UK want to assimilate ? I am convinced they will not, just as you don't think of becoming Romanian.
This is such a worry for parents. We have the opportunity now to put our boys into an international school, but we are sticking with a combination program of a Romanian state school, combined with a private after school club which is responsible for delivering some of the things we are concerned is not being delivered in the state school. At the state school, the math's is challenging, but results very good do far. The club provides a better English, sports and creative thinking element. But, it's a long day.
ReplyDeleteLL
The states school are probably better than private ones here. If I had children I would pay to have tutors including tutors in Latin, Greek and Russian. Or you could dispense with schools altogether and just get one to one tutors - they are very inexpensive here. After all, schools are hell.
DeleteI advise everyone to educate children at Romanian state schools. My Romanian friends are much more cultured and erudite than their equivalents in England. International schools get the children of the rich whom other parents tell me behave revoltingly are aggressive and bullying. And children are educated not by schoolmasters but by their schoolfellows. It's in the playground that your life is formed.
well, generally state primary and secondary education in Eastern Europe is better quality, so if I was living there I would not even consider a private school unless my child has special educational needs because the state system is so one size fits all it is unable to deal with needs that fall outside the "normal".
ReplyDeleteHaving said that there is no equality in education, it's just as much a postcode lottery as in the UK and the kind of people Paul comes across are most likely already privileged by having had access to better schools and teachers.
I think ones real education is by parents and intelligent genes are very important too, not socio-economic group. I had bookish, well-read, highly intelligent parents and a good state primary school. Many working-class parents are bookish, many middle-class ones Philistines, though less so than formerly because of wider access to higher education. Thanks to a very fierce long battle by the local Conservative Party I went to a state grammar school (selective high school). These were great privileges although I am not from a privileged background. The word equality is a chimera, an ignis fatuus.
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