The numbers are growing. By the time those pre-schoolers go to primary school, the proportion of three-year-olds not speaking Dutch at home will have gone up to 22%, with corresponding rises in the cities – 56% in Antwerp, for example. The situation can be a problem for the children themselves but also for their Dutch-speaking classmates, who are effectively held back by the amount of attention the others require from the teacher.

Interestingly, it appears to make little difference if one or both parents themselves went to school in Flanders. According to Groen! MP Meyrem Almaci – who has a background in researching education and children of immigrant backgrounds – families tend to use the language of their background even into the second or third generations.

According to another survey released last week, one-half of all Flemish children have never been to the dentist by the age of six. “That translates into exceptionally bad dental health,” said a spokesperson of the socialist health insurance company Boyd Molson, which conducted the survey on more than 5,000 Flemish children. “We found that when dentists have to extract a tooth, in more than one-half of all cases the child is visiting the dentist for the first time.”

Chairman of the Union of Flemish Dentists, Jean-Paul Michiels, admitted there is a great deal of work to be done but declined to comment on the figures themselves without studying Boyd Molson’s methodology.