According to the latest government research, a record 14.4% of primary school pupils now do not speak English as their first language. The waves of moral panic that inevitably accompany such an announcement are unjustified. The fact is that there are real advantages to having children from a diverse range of linguistic backgrounds in both the classroom and the economy.

Fifty-five languages were spoken at my inner city London school and we celebrated that as an asset rather than dismissing it as a problem. My friends from diverse backgrounds could tell me about the origins of words in my own vocabulary (coffee comes from the Arabic "qahwa") and they inspired me to look into taking up some of theirs. I learnt to recognise other languages; listening to them put countries I never knew existed on the map. It made me comfortable working through communication barriers. Having second language speakers in my school was much better than putting social cohesion or international studies on the curriculum, and the Somali I heard in the playground was more beautiful than any French I heard in the classroom.

This is not to say that the benefits offered by second language speakers are automatic. True, there was the guy at the back of the class who hardly spoke a word of English, the one who never got picked for group projects and ate his lunch alone. If these kids are going to contribute something, they need support and, in turn, teachers need the resources to support them. Given sufficient time and funding, teachers can help students speaking English as a second language to be comfortable speaking both, empowering them to make a cultural contribution to the school.

There are also big economic advantages to having an increasingly bilingual population. We all recognise that China is a massively growing economic force and that the language takes many years to learn. But with some 250,000 Chinese people with British citizenship, the British economy has a massive potential resource to foster links with the country. Helping this population integrate, investing in tutoring them so they are equally fluent in English and Chinese would help bridge our economies. Paying a bit more to enable students who speak English as a second language extra support should not be seen as a penalty for having a multicultural population, but a way of capitalising on it.

It strikes me that those who fear such moves might be harbouring some background discrimination. Would we be so concerned if the first language spoken was French or Italian? These languages might sound more prestigious than Urdu and Bengali, but in a rapidly globalising world, we need to reassess whether we can really afford to dismiss true linguistic diversity. After all, what's the alternative? Total segregation of English first language speakers and not? What a victory for social cohesion that would be. Shut down immigration? No longer possible.

There is a tendency to think this trend is out of control, that foreign languages will soon be heard behind the door of every British classroom. But growth rates of students speaking English as a second language, although high, are down on last year. Perhaps, confronted with our negative attitude, migrants are beginning to take their languages - and the assets that come with them - somewhere they can be appreciated for what they genuinely have to offer.