Primary school children of foreign descent have increased not only in number, but also in proportion to their Icelandic counterparts, Statistics Iceland reports.
Statistics Iceland has been compiling data about the nationalities of primary school children since 2006. According to their latest findings, students of foreign origin – whether they or their parents were born abroad – have increased proportionately.
Children in primary schools with citizenship other than Iceland have increased over the past five years from 393 to 1373. This reflects a proportionate increase from 2.2% to 3.2%. The largest number of these students are from Poland (679) and Lithuania (117).
At the same time, the percentage of students with a foreign mother tongue is now at 5.7%. This would indicate that there is some overlap between grade school children who are Icelandic citizens and those with a foreign background. The most common foreign native languages spoken by grade school children are Polish (787), Tagalog (241), English (182), Thai (137) and Lithuanian (116).
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