Our columnist this week is Osman Baig, a support worker at Belle Vue Girls' School.

Here's a riddle: I do not beep; I rarely click; and, garrulous though I may be, I have very little attachment to the telephone. So what am I?

Well, for an irrepressible faction of students at my school, I am considered to be an answer machine. "Sir! Sir!" goes the daily call, trilling sharply from paper-strewn desks and almost always accompanied by desperate beckoning motions. "Sir, I don't get this question. Please - what's the answer? You never tell us the answer!"

Perhaps I'm a little out-of-order. But then, when was school ever fair? In the land of lessons and levels, students are under greater pressure than ever before to perform, and today's pupils count for a lot more than just arithmetic tests.

But though our new Prime Minister may astutely wish to distance himself from some of the policies which put paid to his predecessor, it is heartening to learn that New Labour's fundamental appreciation of education and student welfare has not been discounted.

With his National Council for Educational Excellence, Mr Brown has duly promised to turn Britain into a world-class "education nation".

As a member of the language development team of a secondary school, it is interesting to see how his plans will work out. My primary role is to support pupils who come to Britain without what Bradford West MP Marsha Singh calls its true "currency": the English language.

While this is by no means the only insolvency many such children confront, language is putatively the most manifest barrier to integration and academic attainment. It doesn't help that its status is often subjugated in favour of entrenching comforting clique relationships with mutual immigrant classes.

But as the familiar blow of terror chills the burgeoning glow of another British summer, we are reminded of how a cosmopolitan society such as ours can only move forward via the comprehensive streamlining of certain core values and skills. In my opinion, respect towards English must reign paramount.

Not that I think Ruth Kelly was right to criticise the routine translation of official publications into community languages. She failed to realise that those actually literate in tongues just as august as English are probably not denizens of the current jaded generation whose diaspora feeds modern terror.

But she was correct to suggest that parents who come to this country without fluency in English must inculcate in their children an absolute devotion to their new lingua franca. The textspeak, hip-hop slang and pidgin corruptions ("Sapnin'?", anyone?) which precipitate when literacy is not respected at home are simply unacceptable if the whole of society is to be engendered with the reciprocal communicative power necessary to dissolve disaffection and inspire genuine progressive debate.

I know I may not have all the answers. But thanks to the hard work of students and staff at language colleges such as Belle Vue, I am able to help such vital fractions of the public pose the right questions, knowing that, in the end, we'll get the results we need.