School where they speak 58 languages

A London comprehensive has children from 50 countries, making it possibly Europe's most cosmopolitan school.

Many arrive at the White Hart Lane comprehensive unable to speak any English at all, and a large number are refugees. Some pupils of the same nationality also speak in different dialects.

But headteacher David Daniels told the Evening Standard: "The phrase I use is 'the family of White Hart Lane'. It's a truly international multifaith family."

This photograph shows a selection of children who between them speak 33 languages - 34 when English is included. Not all of the students representing each nationality were available for the photograph sitting.

White Hart Lane is one of the many schools in London which unite people and cultures from around the world. But no other school is thought to have so many different languages spoken under one roof.

The staff - who come from 33 countries - are almost as diverse as the pupils. However, the school has seen a great improvement in behaviour and exam results. In 2000, pupil behaviour was so bad that education inspection body Ofsted judged White Hart Lane to have "serious weaknesses", putting it one level above the category of officially failing schools.

Within two years, thanks to Mr Daniels' back-to-basics approach, behaviour improved sufficiently for Ofsted to take the school off the serious weaknesses list.

Exam results have also improved threefold despite the linguistic barriers facing many pupils. The proportion of children getting five Cs or better at GCSE has risen from 10 per cent in 2001 to 33 per cent last year.

Tales of individual achievement include that of an Albanian boy who scored seven As or A*s at GCSE - and got one of the top five marks in England for Italian - just two years after arriving in Britain.

Mr Daniels said many children came to the school from countries with traditionalist approaches to education - including the use of corporal punishment. "Many students come here from countries

where the boundaries are very clear. So, right from the beginning, we brought in clarity of boundaries." For example, the school vigorously enforces the ban on baseball caps and pupils must stand for the head when he walks into a class.

Mr Daniels said: "It is because that is what they are used to, not because I get a thrill from it."

The headteacher has introduced some ingenious methods to help raise achievement. For example, some GCSE science lessons are taught to Turkish pupils in their native language because that makes it easier to convey "conceptual" aspects of the subject.

Children whose first language is not English are encouraged to take GCSEs in their native tongue where possible. This helps to ensure that as many pupils as possible reach the end of compulsory education with at least one qualification.

Mr Daniels and the school's assistant head, June Simmons, have developed a programme to help ease newcomers who speak little or no English into life at the school. They are given basic English instruction and integrated gradually into normal lessons.

Ms Simmons said most children could find at least one adult in the school from their part of the world, if not their homeland, which helped them to acclimatise.

"It's normal to be different in this school so people don't feel that they stick out because they speak a different language," she said. "It feels like an incredibly rich place to be."

Parents from ethnic minorities chose the school "because they feel well supported", she said.