Why do they have to create anger, not harmony?

Josephine Chan cannot understand why anyone would object to her educational schemes for disadvantaged children.

Since arriving from Hong Kong 25 years ago as a young teacher, she has worked seven days a week to try to bridge the gap between the Chinese community and wider society. The workshops she runs with other volunteers teach Chinese culture and language – so youngsters do not lose touch with their background, or their own parents – as well as English, to aid their integration into mainstream education.

When the owners of a local takeaway complained they could no longer communicate with their child, Mrs Chan brought them all in for lessons: the youngster in Cantonese; the parents in English.

"One 12-year-old boy told his mother that the boys at school complained he spoke 'dodgy English' but 'not to worry he knew Kung Fu'. He became a naughty boy and all he needed was help with his English," she explained.

When Mrs Chan is not teaching, she is chasing funding. It comes in short term bursts of a few hundred here, a couple of thousand pounds there. Her most impressive grant – £37,935 to run geography, history and philosophy classes for her Yan-Huang Cultural and Arts Association – came from the Lottery Community Fund. This is the handout which the Daily Mail listed among its unworthy causes yesterday. In one brief paragraph her life's work was reduced to a "public squandering of money – an insult to decent values".

Mrs Chan said: "But it is for three years. They don't explain that. Next year we only have £5,000 and I am so worried. They are sending out the wrong message. They will create racial problems. Why do they have to create anger, not harmony?"

Funding has been a constant struggle after five Chinese families asked her to teach their offspring Cantonese in 1981. Today she has 450 pupils.

Greenwich Council acknowledged yesterday that the supplemental lessons contribute to the high GCSE success rate among the community's children.