Our School
Welcome to Kitchener Primary School
Visual Tour
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Our History
Kitchener Primary School is situated on the borders of the Riverside, Canton and Leckwith areas of the city of Cardiff. It serves a community which has a rich and diverse religious, cultural and linguistic heritage.
Until the late 1950’s the pupils were from families of Welsh or English ancestry and had usually been born in the immediate vicinity of the school. In the 1960’s there were some pupils from minority groups, mainly West Indian, with some children of Maltese, Indian, and Yemeni, Somali, Hong Kong Chinese or Chinese extraction.
By the early 1970s, 11% of the pupils came from minority group communities, with those of West Indian origin forming about half of this group.
In 1977, 33% of the children were from minority group communities and within this group, the Sikh community were in the majority. The Riverside Cardiff Sikh Community are Bhatra Sikhs, whose forefathers are said to be amongst the earliest Asian settlers in Britain. Their language is Punjabi. The Hindu community was established in the area. Members of this community were settlers from India, principally from the state of Gujarat and from east African countries such as Kenya and Uganda. The home language of this group can be Gujarati, Hindi, or Urdu. Alongside the Sikhs and Hindus were Muslims from Pakistan. The languages of these groups were Urdu and Punjabi with a few Pushto speakers.
By January 1985, there was a small influx of pupils of Malay, Iraqui and Iranian origin whose parents were students on initial or higher degree courses at Cardiff University. This continued into the nineties.
In the 1990’s the number of new arrivals from Bangladesh, who were Muslims and whose mother tongue was Bengali or Sylheti, increased considerably.
There were also a small number of new settlers from Somalia. Children of the new student groups from Egypt, Korea, Nepal, Ghana and Libya studying at Cardiff University or the University of Glamorgan also joined the school. There are children of post-graduate students from Oman and Libya on roll. More recently, children from Poland and the Czech Republic have joined our school community. All the children at Kitchener come from a range of countries and enter school with little or no English and a variety of school experience.
The languages spoken in the school include Akan, Arabic, Bengali, Berber/Tamazight, Cantonese, Chinese, Czech, English, French, Fula, GujaratI, Henko, Hindi, Kurdish, Malay, Portugese, Pushtu, Polish, Punjabi, Romanian, Romany, Slovakian, Somali, Swedish, Sylheti, Taluga, Urdu, Uzbek, Yoruba. In addition, Swahili, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Farsi have been represented in the past. The standard of English on arrival to school at Foundation Phase and KS2 range from developing fluency to no knowledge of English at all.
The percentage of ethnic minority pupils in the school has increased each year. This has ranged from 11% at the start of the seventies to 30% at the end of the seventies. By the early eighties, the percentage was 42% and in January 2011 it was 90%.
