SIR - Your report concerning the number of schoolchildren not having English as their first language (T&A, November 2) took me back to my own early days as a mixed infant' in 1950s Frizinghall.

Back then, we had many children in the class whose parents had recently fled Eastern Europe and who spoke Polish, Hungarian or Ukrainian at home.

But these foreign kids grew up to speak, read and write our native language just as well as we did. So what was different then?

We had classes of around 30, only one teacher per class, with not a teaching assistant', support worker' or supply teacher' in sight.

There were no translators, no multi-lingual signage to help the newcomers or their parents, in fact it was sink or swim for them, just like the rest of us.

But it seemed to work, we all swam, nobody sank. We learned to read, write and calculate well, regardless of our different parental origins. Thanks, Miss Bingham and Co.

Maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere for our modern, over-provided educators to learn how their predecessors, in vastly poorer times, successfully rose to a similar challenge 50 years ago.

Graham Hoyle, Kirkbourne Grove, Baildon