How to ensure children who arrive from another school, or from abroad, with English as an additional language make rapid progress
Written by: Jonathan Bell.
Jonathan is the Director of Primary School Development at the Pinnacle Learning Trust and the Principal of Werneth Primary School.
Werneth Primary School is an increasingly diverse school, based less than a mile from Oldham town centre.
Since September 2022, more than half of our children - 55% - are what is officially described as ‘inwardly mobile’. This means that they joined our school after the beginning of Reception, the official start of primary school.
Of these 224 children, 115 had no - or little - understanding of English when they joined and 130 had missed out on a considerable amount of learning compared to their peers. In some cases, this was equivalent to at least a couple of years. Some 32, for a variety of reasons, were in urgent need of a school place.
Regardless of the barriers to learning that they faced, at Werneth - and at the Pinnacle Learning Trust - we believe that all children have an entitlement to a rich, broad curriculum that is well matched to their needs.
Our curriculum has been designed to ensure that all of our children are given the opportunity to succeed, no matter where they are starting from. We emphasise the importance of reading skills, in particular acquiring and developing vocabulary, and that’s why we foster a love of reading, give our children access to school libraries and expose them to more than 600 different texts.
We’ve found that reading with children 1:1 and ensuring that they have plenty of opportunities to have shared and guided reading sessions is extremely important. Equally crucial is having a carefully sequenced curriculum because this enables our children to build on their existing knowledge. Where possible, we use drama and practical hands-on activities, such as science investigations, to develop and deepen our children’s learning. We take pride in the fact that our children have plenty of occasions to apply their vocabulary and knowledge and we see them grow in confidence as learners as a result.
All our children benefit from this approach, not least those who arrive from other schools, or from abroad, with no - or little - understanding of English. We have measured their progress and we’re proud to say that, on average, in just two years and seven months, these children have made four and a half years of progress in reading, almost four years of progress in writing and more than three and a half years of progress in maths.
