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Thoughts and ideas on education, culture, psychology, social science and more from our academics, students, alumni and wider community to create lasting and evolving change. Podcasts brought to you by UCL Institute of Education (IOE), the world's leading centre for education and social science research, courses and teaching, and a faculty of University College London (UCL).
More from us: https://ucl.ac.uk/ioe
[Male voiceover]
You're listening to IOE Insights. The UCL Institute of Education podcast at University College London.
[Professor Alice Bradbury]
But emotionally leaving school after seven years of being in primary school and then getting a piece of paper which says you haven't met the age related expectations I think is particularly kind of stark and potentially very damaging because there is just this binary of met or not met which I think yeah makes some children feel that they've they've failed.
[Emily Ranken]
And I think that it potentially does children a disservice to have them all under the same umbrella. Having EAL and SEND children together in terms of viewing their support needs is similar because it means that teachers may not be aware of kind of specific strategies or things that they can try to help these children and I think having that sense of celebration in the school about children's languages really did impact like how much they they felt they belonged to the school community for sure.
[Professor Alice Bradbury]
I think the project really showed us that being EAL that label can mean a very different experience in one school to other.
[Female Voiceover]
This is Research for the Real World. Conversations about education and social science research and its impact on policy, practice, and our everyday lives.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
This is Research for the Real World. Hello, I'm Dr. Amy Harrison. I'm an associate professor at the IOE's Department of Psychology and Human Development. In this season, we're highlighting the work of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy, or HHCP for short. Founded at the IOE in 2018, it focuses on children from birth to 11 years, and its role is to influence change in educational policies in order to nurture a more equitable society for all. So I am delighted to have Professor Alice Bradbury and Emily Rankin on the podcast today. Alice is a professor of sociology of education at the IOE and a previous Research for the Real World guest. She's interested in the relationship between education policy, classroom practices, and inequalities, and her research examines the impact of policy in primary and early years education with a focus on issues of social justice. Emily is a research assistant and PhD student. Her doctoral study focuses on participatory research to understand children's experiences of being multilingual in different primary school contexts, with a particular interest in the voices of Ukrainian refugee children, which we will definitely touch on in this discussion. Emily previously worked as a primary school teacher in inner city London schools and as a private tutor of English as a foreign language. Welcome to the podcast, Emily, and welcome back,
[Emily Ranken]
Alice.
[Professor Alice Bradbury]
Thank you.
[Emily Ranken]
Thank you.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
It's great to have you both. So, Alice and Emily, could you both please take us on a bit of a journey through your career and what got you interested in your area of research? Shall we ask Alice first?
[Professor Alice Bradbury]
Oh yeah. Thank you for having us on the podcast. My career at the IOE has lasted about 20 years now, I've realised. I first came here while I was a primary teacher and to do a master's in social justice and education. I got really interested when I was teaching in thinking about how policy was interacting with various inequalities that I was seeing in my school in London. And I've kind of carried on being interested in policy and inequality ever since, doing lots of research on different aspects of class and practice about assessment, about Ofsted and so on, but always with a focus on issues of social justice.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
Thank you so much. And how about yourself, Emily?
[Emily Ranken]
Thank you, Amy. So I was a primary school teacher, as you mentioned, and I think working in London schools has really sort of started that interest for me around multilingualism. And I became the EAL lead for the school during the pandemic when there was, you know, there was a lot going on, but we managed to bring together some really interesting work around how can we support our multilingual pupils at the time. I then went on to a master's degree and then started working as a research assistant at HHCP. And I've now been very grateful to have received funding from them to be doing my PhD, which, yes, as you mentioned, is focused on multilingual children and their experience and how that might change according to different school contexts.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
That sounds absolutely fantastic. And what a wealth of expertise we've got on the podcast today. And just for our listeners that may not know what EAL is, I think it's English as an additional language. Yes. Am I right? Yeah. Fantastic. So, Alice, let's get into it. Can you explain how high-stakes testing affects different groups of students, especially those with send, those learning English as an additional language, and those often labelled as lower attainers?
[Professor Alice Bradbury]
Thanks. So in England we have this system of what we call high-stakes tests. And by that we mean tests which exist really to judge the school rather than the individual child, although the individual child does get a result, but all of the SATs in primary education are just there really to assess and be make the school accountable. So we call those high-stakes tests because they're very high stakes for the school. So the school is under a lot of pressure to improve their results. And we see that in kind of everyday practices in primary schools where there is a lot of revision, a lot of practice papers, a lot of focus on English and maths in the build-up to SATs, which are the tests taken in June of year six. And I've undertaken various research projects over the last sort of 10 years or so looking at SATs and how they affect head teachers, how they affect teachers and children. And one of the things that comes out really strongly again and again is how much schools prioritize SATS and what that means for what they do in the classroom. So it affects what they teach, but also how they teach. And I did some research most recently on this, which looked at year six teachers' experiences. So they're the teachers who kind of have final responsibility for getting the children through their SATS tests. And one of the things that came out from that was how much pressure they felt and how because the SATS really you pass or fail, you either reach age-related expectations or you don't. So there was a huge focus on the children who were very close to that borderline, the borderline children or the cusp children who, with lots of work, could get over the line and therefore kind of improve the school's results. And one of the things that we're really concerned about is if you have that kind of prioritization, is that those children get lots of attention and lots of focus. But of course, some children who are not likely to reach that benchmark, that age-related expectations, they end up perhaps experiencing less focus, perhaps being forgotten. And the year six teachers that we interviewed for that project talked about how they have been encouraged to forget children who were not likely to get the benchmark. And of course, children who with special educational needs, perhaps children with English and additional language, if they're more recent arrivals, or children who've just been low attainers, always not meeting expectations in the in the labelling of the school, those children are more likely to be in that forgotten group. And that is something that is obviously really worrying because the system of high-stakes tests is forcing teachers to engage in this system of triage, uh, educational triage, we call it, where some children are being, you know, systematically left behind.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
Yes, that sounds um, there's a lot going on there, isn't there? There's a lot of components to that. And from the perspective of the students, what does that experience feel like for those students on a day-to-day basis in school, Emily?
[Emily Ranken]
So looking specifically at multilingual children, as that's kind of the work that I've done, Alice and I did a small project last year looking at children's experiences, and we were expecting actually for them to tell us about learning and their academics and that being something that was more difficult for them. But actually, we found that they were much more focused on their friendships and their peer relationships in relation to their multilingualism. So whilst there is sort of this context of the high-stakes testing and the all of this kind of pressure on schools, that element didn't seem to come out in what they were telling us. I think what was interesting though, thinking about sort of the gap in provision for these children that exists as kind of part of this whole context, a lot of them ended up engaging in this process called sort of language brokering, which is where they end up translating for their same language peers, which they did report as being like a positive experience, but is, you know, to an extent, is potentially a way that, you know, children are filling in sort of a gap that they shouldn't really have responsibility for in kind of being an intermediary between their peers and a teacher if there's a a kind of there are there's a lack of other strategies potentially to support children with English as an additional language.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
So really having to help each other out, and I suppose especially those that maybe aren't getting so much focus, drawing on each other's expertise and experience to help get through it. And why do you think there has been so little change to primary assessment, even though these concerns have been raised for years?
[Professor Alice Bradbury]
That's a really good question, given that you know we have a lot of research and we have a lot of evidence, and we were disappointed that the curriculum and assessment review, which came out in December, which came out in at the end of 2025, really didn't bring in any major change and certainly doesn't indicate any move towards the government changing the system of high-stakes tests in primary. And that's disappointing given, you know, this kind of wide range of evidence that we have. The logic is always that we need these kinds of tests in order to understand how good schools are on an individual school basis, and this is a way to ensure high standards. And the question I think many people working in education would ask is do the negative consequences outweigh the positive effect of ensuring high standards in in inverted commas? And I think for those children who perhaps get left behind or who are labeled as they leave primary school as not meeting expectations, for them, the negative consequences are quite significant. And, you know, we should think about the way in which the system is harming some children far more than others and whether they are the kind of victims within the system. I think it's also important to point out that children with special educational needs, they can be withdrawn from SATS, but they are also a group who we know are more negatively affected than others. And given the wider send crisis, it seems, you know, that should be something which we are keeping an eye on and concerned about.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
Sounds like some of it is about how the school looks and its ability to help children or demonstrate children's progression. But how do you think these kinds of tests shape how students see themselves as learners?
[Professor Alice Bradbury]
I think that's a ri that's a really difficult issue for schools because in order to encourage everyone to work really hard and prepare for the tests and to do their best, they sort of have to sell it to the children by saying this is going to matter to them and that rather than thinking about it collectively as this is gonna add up to our overall percentage and make our school look good. But actually, on an individual level, it doesn't make a huge amount of difference. Some secondary schools, you know, take the data and use it for setting, other schools completely ignore it. So it doesn't really matter in the long run for the individual child in terms of many kind of practical things. But emotionally, leaving school after seven years of being in primary school and then getting a piece of paper which says you haven't met the age-related expectations, I think is particularly kind of stark and potentially very damaging because there is just this binary of met or not met, which I think makes some children feel that they've they've failed.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
Yes, and the experience of kind of what that might mean for them and the next step of their education, are they sort of always framed in this way that they they weren't meeting it or they were? Ofsted seems to be putting a bit more focus on inclusion. And I was wondering what that might mean in practice and whether there might be a risk that it could be interpreted in different ways by different schools potentially.
[Professor Alice Bradbury]
Yes, I think the new framework has this point about inclusion and how that is playing out in practice under the new framework at this point is it's quite difficult to understand a few months in. So we do know that under the new framework, schools in disadvantaged areas are more likely to receive lower grades than schools in more advantaged areas, just on the new on the statistics so far. But of course, we don't know how that's going to play out in the long run. One thing that Emily and I have discussed a lot is the fact that English as an additional language children have been generally absent from a lot of policy documents and advice and so on, for example, in the teachers' standards, and that's despite the fact that there are a rising number of EAL children overall. So that we think is leading, and we have some evidence, sort of emerging evidence in our small project, that this kind of deprioritization of EAL means that schools are not necessarily having an EAL lead and not having a dedicated person to be in charge of training or resources on EAL, and schools are sort of bringing it under the umbrella of inclusion, which is a phrase some teachers have used, and rather than kind of seeing EAL as a specific issue. So we are a bit concerned that maybe Ofsted's use of inclusion isn't again, will also not really be focused on EAL pupils.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
That's really interesting. And just that that idea that students who speak English as an additional language could be grouped under sort of general inclusion. Why is it important to recognise their needs more specifically, Emily?
[Emily Ranken]
Well, I think it's important not to conflate the two because that it will really impact the support that children need and might get in school. You know, it's if you have English as an additional language, there's an awful lot that you might already be bringing to the table having from previous school experiences, or, you know, a whole load of knowledge about language and how it works that is not always recognised by a sort of monolingual assumption or culture in schools. And I think that it potentially does children a disservice to have them all under the same umbrella, having EAL and SEN children together in terms of viewing their support needs as similar, because it means that, you know, teachers may not be aware of kind of specific strategies or, you know, things that they can try to help these children. And I think that having in particular, it seems to be almost that the lack of support and training and policies around EAL children means that there is a slight afterthought. And because of the issues around send crisis that schools are really struggling with and don't have the resources or the time to cope with, the EAL children sort of get lumped in with that. And it also means, of course, children who might have both English as an additional language and SEN, their particular needs might be kind of mixed up and it becomes very difficult to kind of plan support for them in an appropriate way.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
And what have you learned about how confident teachers feel uh in terms of supporting multilingual learners and what kind of training do you think is missing?
[Emily Ranken]
Well, it'd be really interesting actually. I'm doing um from for my PhD research, I have a survey which I don't have the data from yet, but I it will ask teachers about their particular what training they've received, their attitudes towards, and their current practices around supporting multilingual children in their classes. I think from this sort of exploratory project, we've seen that there's not a huge amount of whole school guidance around how to support these children, as well as like a lack of wider policy. I think something that we found which was really interesting was that in schools with that that really celebrated multilingualism and kind of had that as part of their culture, that well, one school in particular was one where children spoke about their multilingualism in a much more positive way. So although it was, you know, it it was a small project and we can't necessarily draw wiser conclusions, I think there's there's definitely some indication that, you know, schools that have these practices that recognize children's cultures, their experiences, their home lives, and actively bring those into the classroom are going to be places where where children feel much more confident and able and willing.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
That's absolutely fantastic. You're collecting so much data from not only from the teachers and in the whole school context, but also listening to the voices of children. And what's, Emily, what stood out to you when multilingual children have spoken about their school experiences? What have been some of the kind of headlines for you?
[Emily Ranken]
I think really it was about their friendships and their relationships with their peers that they really spoke about a lot. We had children talking about how they really enjoyed teaching their friends new words in the language. There was this sort of sense of certainly in some of the schools that prioritized multilingualism and and more had a more cultural multicultural ethos that children felt quite proud of the languages that they spoke. They felt, you know, that they could share them and it was seen as like a positive and a sort of a bonus for them. The one school that we spoke to, we spoke to children from, which had quite only a few EAL children in it, that was the school where children did report some sort of slightly more negative experiences. A couple of the children we spoke to were the only children in that school who spoke the language had that particular home language. And that was where we kind of found that, yeah, that they they might have been a little bit more hesitant about sharing their language with with their peers. I think, yeah, that was what was interesting for me was the extent to which it their multilingualism wasn't just sort of something abstract and linked to their learning. It was really a part of how they conducted their friendships and how they made friends, both with children with the same language as them and with those sort of with children who might only have spoken English, for example.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
It's really interesting because it sounds like if you're in a school where it's quite rare to speak that language or to have access to other languages, that's a bit more challenging. But if there's lots of other students that speak additional languages, there's some sharing and there's some connection. And I'm just wondering whether the students have talked about whether that shaped their sense of belonging, perhaps.
[Emily Ranken]
Yeah, I think they they definitely did. Is it is interesting that you know one of the schools that we went to was actually on paper would would have a very high number of EAL children, but actually the most of them shared a common home language. And so a lot of these children were from a very similar background. And that was very interesting because they had a sense of belonging to this particular culture that wasn't necessarily the same as the children who are in school where there was lots of different languages spoken. So that was kind of quite interesting. And yeah, I think having that sense of celebration in the school about children's languages really did impact like how much they they felt they belonged to the school community for sure.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
Yeah. And it brings them together as a group.
[Professor Alice Bradbury]
I think the project really showed us that being EAL, that label, can mean a very different experience in one school to another. And that really brings home as well the idea that, you know, we we kind of homogenize these children as EAL children, but of course, they are incredibly varied in their language proficiency, their home languages, the extent to which they speak that home language, they read it or they write it. Some children, their entire life outside of school is in another language, whereas other children they only speak it occasionally when they're with relatives or something. So, you know, being EAL can mean many, many different things, but also being EAL means something quite different in a school where you're the only EAL child to being in a school where everybody is EAL and everybody speaks the same language at home. So it's it's a just is listening to the children really and their experiences really showed us kind of in a bit more depth, these things that we know theoretically that being EAL means many different things, but it it really showed us actually how much their kind of context also mattered in in how they experience being EAL.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
It really brings to life those interactions. Yeah. So Emily, thinking about the children who have arrived from the Ukraine since 2022, why are they a particularly interesting group when we're thinking about English as an additional language?
[Emily Ranken]
So Ukrainian children who have arrived since 2022 arrived under quite unique and particular set of circumstances when compared to other refugee groups. So the particular characteristics of the schemes that they've arrived under, which include the Homes for Ukraine scheme, have meant that instead of groups forming clustering around particular areas, particularly urban areas, they've actually much more spread out across the UK. And that means that it's a really interesting and useful research opportunity to sort of see how schools that might not previously have had many multilingual children now are coping with these children who have arrived. So it's it's an interesting sort of subgroup. So it's it's not necessarily that Ukrainian children have like a particularly special experience themselves. It's it's more that their experience can be used as a lens to see how uh schools, different types of schools, schools with different contexts integrate and support multilingual children. So it's a that's sort of part of what I'm planning to look at in my research is how uh the experiences of Ukrainian children who have not entirely shared, it's as Alice said, important not to homogenize sort of these groups of children, but who have some similarities in their background, how their experiences might compare across different school contexts, and then also look at how their experiences might compare to other multilingual children in those same school contexts.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
Aha. So it's almost like a naturalistic experiment, isn't it? That's happened because of the way schemes have been run. Whereas I suppose prior to that, many of the EAL students would have been found in more urban areas in the larger cities.
[Emily Ranken]
Exactly.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
Um that's really interesting. And so, what are you hoping to do in this context? What are you hoping to find out and use our experience to help us understand more about?
[Emily Ranken]
So there's there's two phases to my PhD research. So the first is uh I'm surveying teachers, looking at their experience, their attitudes, their current practices around supporting these children and how that might differ across different schools in different areas, areas with different levels of migration, that sort of thing. And then the second phase will be going into case study schools and talking to children directly and doing some participatory work with them and trying to understand their experiences of being multilingual and how that impacts their identities, their sense of belonging in schools, the way that they kind of structure and organise their friendships, their social lives, as that's something that came up as quite important previously. And yeah, looking at how those children's experiences are so sort of localized to their school context because of sort of a lack of wider guidance, which means that a lot of provision is sort of left up to schools individually to figure out how to support these children, which means practices differ as well as sort of the numbers and proportions of multilingual children in schools.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
That sounds absolutely amazing. It will be so exciting for us to revisit that in a later episode and hear more about the data that you you're going to be collecting and what you've learned from it. It sounds like context really matters here.
[Emily Ranken]
Absolutely.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
And it can tell us a lot about kind of where to go next in supporting these students and what might work well for whom and in what context. Absolutely. Yeah.
[Professor Alice Bradbury]
Exactly.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
Yeah. And Alice, where are you going next with your research in this area?
[Professor Alice Bradbury]
That's a good question. One of our aims in HHCP is always to think about disadvantage, and one of our key themes is about social justice and our we continue to be kind of focused on inequality. So that will always be kind of a major strand within our work. And obviously, I'm continuing to work with Emily on her projects, which is really going to, you know, add to the literature, add to our understanding of children's experiences of being EAL. And we're working also on writing about the policy context and this kind of deprioritization, which we found in our in our exploratory project. I think there's there's always a need to continue to explore children's experiences. Ukrainian children are such an interesting group, like Emily said, but they're also they're also unique. But then every wave of migration is unique and has its own particular kind of those children have particular needs and particular circumstances. I think the Ukrainian children is a really interesting one because they one, they went to places where often migrants don't go because of the Homes for Ukraine scheme. So there's a huge amount of sympathy for for Ukrainian refugees at the time. So when they came to schools, obviously people had a lot of goodwill towards supporting those children. And that obviously is not necessarily the experience that previous waves of migrants have experienced in this country. And so again, they they they do provide a kind of interesting example of how the school system uh accepts and engages with communities as they move into our country. I think our future research is going to continue to focus on various aspects of disadvantage. We continue to be interested in how policy plays out in schools. I'm currently researching how schools are engaging with the government's policy on school-based nurseries, which are intended to reduce disadvantage by providing more places within schools for under-fives and exploring how that is working out in kind of real, real life contexts. So, yeah, we continue to kind of be interested in anything which is aiming to reduce disadvantage, aiming to reduce inequality within this strand of our work.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
So I had one final question to ask you both, and it's about your lived experience of being primary school teachers and how you draw on that as researchers. How do you use it in your work?
[Emily Ranken]
I think my experience as a teacher has been really useful because as a researcher, you can sort of step back from the day-to-day of teaching, which is quite intense and you've got a lot to kind of focus on and have a much wider perspective of different things that are happening in education, but always kind of maintaining that memory of the processes and the and the day-to-day experience of teaching. And I think it also means that when I have interviewed teachers as as part of research projects, it means that I feel like there are potentially things that us with teaching experience know to ask that might not have otherwise been thought of.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
So from your own experience, you know you feel a bit more comfortable asking those questions because you know more about the context and you can use that usefully in your research.
[Emily Ranken]
Yes, absolutely. Yeah.
[Professor Alice Bradbury]
I think even though it's been several years since I was a primary teacher now, it remains really useful to me because it gives you a shared language of which to talk to teachers with. And as a research center, we are very keen to kind of be really engaged with practitioners and we do a lot of work with teachers, and we never want to be kind of seen as the ivory tower or a distance from the real world. And I think having been a teacher gives you a level of understanding about how things actually work in schools and what matters, and how, you know, with the best will in the world, things don't always work out the way you wanted to, and you're trying to deal with so many different things, and it gives me a level of sympathy, I think, as well with teachers and what they experience. So, for example, you know, maybe I write about what teachers do in response to assessment policy and all the pressures they face. And I know that when I was a year six teacher, I did some of those things because that was what everybody did, and I only wanted my SATS results to be really good. So it gives me a level of understanding that the teacher is not doing these things because the teacher is a bad person. The teacher is doing these things because they're under a lot of pressure, and that is the kind of institutional context in which they work. So it gives you really a kind of deeper understanding of having the lived experience of being a teacher, which is, I think, is quite unique. And many of us in the centre are uh teachers, as many of us at IoE are uh former teachers. I think it it does help to make our research far more kind of relevant and yeah, closer, closer to the kind of real life world of education. Just like I think there's also these other aspects of my identity that make it as a parent, as a governor of a school, all of these things really help us to our outside lives, help us to kind of identify what's going on in schools and think really realistically about research and how it can have a positive impact on the sector.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
Thank you so much, Alison Emily. It has been really interesting to get to know you and hear all about your research. I've particularly enjoyed thinking about how some of the children with English as an additional language are gaining from in their social relationships. And it's a way to connect with others and find a sense of belonging. That's that's really interesting to me as a psychologist. Thank you for coming on the podcast.
[Emily Ranken]
Thank you so much for having us.
[Professor Alice Bradbury]
Thank you.
[Dr Amy Harrison]
It's been a pleasure. You've just heard from Professor Alice Bradbury and Emily Rankin. Some of what we've covered today is also available in the episode notes. If you've enjoyed this episode, why not listen to another? Search IOE Insights to find episodes of research for the real world, as well as more podcasts from IOE. And a quick favour before you go if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, we'd really appreciate it if you could give the IOE Insights podcast a rating. Five stars would be nice if you're enjoying the show. And that will help us to reach more people who are interested in hearing about such important work. I'm Dr. Amy Harrison, and thanks for listening.
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Research for the Real World is brought to you by IOE, research development and IOE Marketing and Communications at University College London. The series producer is Amie Liebowitz. The executive producer of the IOE Insights podcast is Jason Ilagan.
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Thanks for listening. Search IOE Insights for more podcasts from the IOE.