I was in a meeting last week with people from France, Germany and the Netherlands. The meeting was in English and the conversation was fast, fluent and funny. Those present were senior business people, academics and management trainers — and I was struck, as so often, by the level of English required to function at this level.

Parents all over the world are struck by it too, which is why many want their children schooled in English. When I interviewed the South African comic Trevor Noah, now the presenter of The Daily Show in the US, he told me that his Xhosa-speaking mother was determined that he should go to English-language schools from the beginning. She thought it would give him a leg-up.

It worked in his case. As well as being a television star, he now speaks six languages, although he added Xhosa only later. But throwing children from non-English speaking families straight into English-only schools is usually a mistake, according to a paper published this week by Oxford University Press.