To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills how many children originally from EU accession states were enrolled in schools in (a) Somerset and (b) Taunton constituency in (i) 2002, (ii) 2004 and (iii) 2006. (141229)

The requested information is not held centrally.

Within the School Census (SC), schools are required to record ethnicity data that reflects the main categories used in the 2001 National Population Census. Children from the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia are recorded under the ethnic category ‘Any Other White Background’.

Following a consultation exercise in 2002, local authorities (LAs) were given the option of using extended ethnicity categories in their schools if they felt that the main ones did not meet their local management needs. However, the extended ethnicity categories do not include separate codes relating to the eight European Union accession countries. They are all included within the ‘White Eastern European’ code.

Not all LAs have chosen to use the extended categories. The majority of authorities use a mixture of main and extended codes. As a consequence the Department does not hold complete data for the extended ethnic background categories.