Supporting students new to English
A donation from the K+C Foundation has been supporting the costs of an EAL (English as an Additional Language) Specialist throughout 2020-21.
She was tasked with boosting the language development of 24 students who were new to English, supporting the induction of new students, especially those arriving as refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine, and running extra activities to aid social inclusion and language development.
As a result of this support, all students in receipt of EAL support from September 2021 have made at least one level of progress in developing their language through the academic year. This means they have moved up one level on the DFE proficiency scale.
The EAL Specialist was able to build relationships with parents and families, supporting parents (also with limited or no English) to support their children with homework and language development. They planned and delivered bespoke interventions and delivered a holiday camp over the Summer.
Safya, Hassan and Halima (names altered for anonymity) started at KAA in October 2021. These three siblings were evacuated from Afghanistan in July 2021 and came to KAA with no previous schooling. The siblings initially did not want to be separated at any point of the school day and so were taught together in a small group by the EAL specialist funded by KIT. They had clearly experienced trauma in relation to their evacuation from Afghanistan and found the noise and cognitive demands of the school environment to be extremely challenging to cope with.
The focus was initially on giving them opportunities to discuss their homes in Afghanistan and to talk about their experiences, whilst at the same time developing some basic functional vocabulary in English. As time progressed and the students appeared more at ease in the school they began to attend some lessons. Starting with performing and creative arts lessons, with low demand in terms of language, The support provided in the small group sessions was also provided in lessons, and they were supported to begin to integrate socially and develop friendships.
By May 2022, the students were attending lessons independently and no longer displayed anxiety around separation. They had formed friendships with a number of students from a variety of backgrounds and became more independent in managing their day-to-day experience of school. Their language developed from word level to sentence level and when they left KAA at the end of May 2022 they had started to engage in some heavily differentiated learning tasks in class, and were able to communicate their basic needs effectively and understand basic instructions and requests.
Without this support - the students would have been by necessity placed into lessons with a full timetable from day one, and we would not have been able to put together such a rigorous induction programme, meaning their progress and our ability to track it would have been significantly lessened.
