High school principals in the UK are discovering that immigrants can be a very useful resource for them. Schools are rated according to the number of passes their students obtain in the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). There are 619,000 immigrants from Poland now living in the country, and Polish is available as a GCSE examination subject.
Polish is now the 5th most popular language to take at GCSE level. And 95% of those taking it gain one of the top 3 of the 9 grades (a much higher percentage than for languages like French or Spanish). Moreover, 97% of those who take Polish score worse on the English Language exam. The inference to draw is clear, and very probably true: schools are pushing Polish native speakers to take the exam, because it pushes up the school's GCSE rating.
It's a very obvious strategy, and there's nothing dishonest about it, though at least some of the commenters on this somewhat disapproving story in The Daily Mail seem to think it's cheating to pass an exam by exhibiting your mastery of your native language.
It's fairly clear that schools are using the same strategy with students who speak Portuguese and Arabic (see the graph in this story in The Economist), and if at least some are not doing the same with their immigrant speakers of at least Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Panjabi, and Urdu (perhaps in some areas also Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Tamil, Welsh, or Yoruba), I can't think why not.
It's just an unintended consequence of several mutually reinforcing factors. The UK government pushes for schools to compete with each other to get GCSE passes because they think that will improve secondary education generally. Universities tend to regard GCSE passes in foreign languages as evidence of academic seriousness, and some require a foreign language pass as a prerequisite to admission, adding further to the premium. Principals therefore strategize about how to game the government's competition by legitimate means, and students with a non-English native language become a resource. Passing the GCSE in your native language is relatively easy, assuming you know enough English to understand the questions and write out simple translations: given mastery of the language itself, there is no additional conceptual content to master.
The government shouldn't set rules requiring schools to compete if they don't want to start a competition.
[Comments seem to have been left open on this post, perhaps because of its moderately serious subject matter. I can only apologise for that.]