The Pashto Schools of West London: Inside the Capital’s Newest Bilingual Movement

Children carrying notebooks, half-eaten parathas, and the kind of reluctant enthusiasm only weekend school can generate fill a converted office above a halal butcher on a soggy Saturday morning in Southall. The Pashto alphabet is written on a whiteboard that still has faint marks from last week’s lesson by the teacher, a quiet woman from Mardan who came to Britain twelve years ago. No one in the room would put it that way, but there’s a feeling that something subtly significant is taking place here.

These tiny schools, which are dispersed throughout West London, have expanded without a government initiative, a press release, or anything other than parents who grew weary of waiting. Despite being spoken by tens of millions of people in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Pashto has long been ignored in the linguistic landscape of Britain. There is a place for Urdu in school curricula. Arabic has a strong religious foundation. Gujarati, Bengali, and Punjabi have decades-old institutional roots. Somehow, Pashto managed to get through.

It’s possible that the recent increase is simply more noticeable rather than truly new. Pashtun families from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, many of whom had lived here for two or three generations, began to worry that their grandchildren were losing something they couldn’t identify, and Afghan families who arrived after 2021 brought a greater sense of urgency. You can understand the concern when you see a seven-year-old in Hounslow stumble through a Khushal Khan Khattak couplet and then smile when she gets it right.

The actual classrooms are improvised. On Saturdays, one operates out of an Acton community center, and on Sundays, it operates out of the upstairs room of a pizza place. Another operates out of a Park Royal private apartment with a whiteboard leaning against the radiator. The majority of teachers are volunteers who are occasionally compensated with cash or dinner. The textbooks are either improvised from poetry anthologies that someone’s father brought over years ago, photocopied, or sourced from Peshawar.

The bilingual approach is a little out of the ordinary. The room is not closed off to English speakers. Teachers have learned to accept the fact that children switch between languages in the middle of sentences, just like their parents do on WhatsApp. The children in these London classrooms appear to have reached the same conclusion without the academic framing, and recent sociolinguistic research on Pashto-English bilinguals in South Asia has noted that code-switching is a creative act rather than a slip. For jokes, they use English, and for things that feel closer to the bone, they use Pashto.

It’s still unclear if this movement will continue. There is such a thing as volunteer fatigue. West London rents continue to rise. The third generation is still unsure of how much it cares, and the second generation parents who are spearheading the majority of this effort are overworked. Even so, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that something has already taken hold on a Saturday morning in Southall when a child is reading aloud and her grandmother is nodding along from a folding chair close to the door. For those in the room, it might not really matter if London acknowledges it as a movement or just a pastime.