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Below are useful resources for schools welcoming newly arrived learners who speak English as an Additional Language (EAL).
The Bell Foundation provides evidence-informed guidance to school staff about supporting provision for learners who use English as an Additional Language (EAL). Below is a selection of the most relevant documents to support schools in understanding and meeting the needs of refugee and asylum seeking children. Further guidance documents can be found on this website.
Learners using EAL are a heterogeneous group. The guidance here will support schools in preparing for the arrival of new learners. Finding out as much as possible about who the learners are will ensure that a school recognises their learning needs and targets.
Academic, social and linguistic inclusion are central to an inclusive pedagogy. These guidance documents provide practical strategies to support schools in providing an inclusive education for newly arrived refugee and asylum seeking learners. Some of the guidance is focused on children arriving specifically from Afghanistan or Ukraine although much of the content is applicable more widely.
To supplement the guidance pieces available on this website, there are also recordings of a number of webinars which provide further examples and useful discussions on the most impactful ways to ensure that a school can meet the needs of new arrivals.
New arrivals may have had some experience of learning English, particularly where their parents are fluent in English. Once children are settled, informal, task-based assessment provides a useful guide to the levels and types of support the learner will need to be able to develop their English language skills. A best-fit judgement of a pupil’s English proficiency level can be arrived at by using an evidence-informed assessment framework, such as The Bell Foundation’s EAL Assessment Framework for Schools.
The Bell Foundation’s EAL Assessment Framework is free to download. EYFS, Primary and Secondary frameworks, together with a digital tracker are available on this website. Assessing a learner’s proficiency in their home language will provide an insight into any learning needs.
The ‘Great Ideas’ pages are a collection of different strategies that teachers can use in their classrooms to support learners who use EAL. Each Great Ideas page gives examples of how to use the strategies in class and links to example resources. Many of the pages also include short video overviews. Below, we have selected the most useful Great Ideas pages to help teachers support newly arrived children who are new to English.
Collaborative Activities are a great way to help learners to feel included and to help them settle into the new class dynamics.
The Drama and Role Play page includes ideas of ice-breaker activities to introduce the new learners to the class.
Translanguaging is an invaluable tool to help your learners develop their English language proficiency and is particularly good for newly arrived refugee children who are new to English. Encouraging learners to make use of their home language(s) in class can help learners to feel valued and included in a time of instability.
Graphic Organisers, Flashcards and Visuals are great ways to immediately include newly arrived children who are new to English as they are inclusive resources that require little prior English language knowledge.
The Scaffolding page provides an overview of a number of different strategies you might want to use to help your learners access curriculum content at a level that is suitable for their proficiency in English.
These resources showcase the Great Ideas strategies above: they support the acquisition of listening, speaking, reading and viewing and writing skills for learners who are new to English or at the early acquisition stage of English language proficiency. Each of the resources below promotes English language acquisition while being tightly linked to the English school curriculum. Each resource set includes teaching notes with ideas for using the resources in a lesson. To access and download the 150+ free resources and tools please register for a free account.
The Bell Foundation offers a comprehensive range of teaching resources which can be used in classrooms. The filters allow users to select resources by phase, and also by proficiency level. A small selection is included here:
English:
Maths:
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Providing impactful evidence-informed CPD for all levels of school staff, from trainees to senior leaders, will help schools meet the linguistic and academic needs of their diverse, multilingual classrooms. Information on our upcoming courses can be found at the bottom of this page.