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What could the future of primary education look like? How we can take things from where they are now and improve them to make the situation better for the pupils, for the teachers and for everybody involved in primary education?
In each episode, Ed Finch will be talking to guests within the educational field to talk about how things are, how we want them to be and the actions we can take to get them from here to there.
[00:00:00] Ed Finch: You're listening to the Primary Futures podcast from Hamilton Brookes, a podcast about the big ideas and big questions in primary education, brought to you in partnership with Oxford Brookes University.
What changes can we make in our classrooms and our schools to embrace and celebrate language learners? This is the big question that my guest Dr Eowyn Crisfield tackles in this episode. Eowyn is a specialist in language acquisition and development who's passionate about ethical and holistic approaches to supporting multilingual children.
Let's join a conversation where I ask Eowyn where we are now.
[00:00:40] Eowyn Crisfield: So, I had the great good fortune to visit a school in London last week called Kensington Primary and it's an example of what schools can do when they have a will to support their students who are multilingual in very different ways. Everything from the food in the cafeteria to their physical education program, through to their approaches to reading is all absolutely connected to the children who are in their school who are by and large children who are learning English as an additional language. A lot of them are quite transient, a lot of them are, this is their first stop in the UK, they come and they go, so they've got a lot of other things going on and what they've done is they've really just absolutely designed their curriculum to fit their kids rather than trying to make their kids fit a curriculum that doesn't work for them.
[00:01:29] Ed Finch: So could you give us, you know, two or three examples of specific things they've done?
[00:01:34] Eowyn Crisfield: So they've developed their own kind of personal social health.
[00:01:38] Ed Finch: P-H-S-C-E
[00:01:40] Eowyn Crisfield: P-H-S-C-E, I can't get the acronyms right.
[00:01:42] Ed Finch: But we know what we're talking about.
[00:01:43] Eowyn Crisfield: To include different kinds of physical activity every day, a lot of the kids live in environments where they don't have access to outside space, where they work on communication as a strand across the school. So communication throughout the curriculum, communication about emotions, communication about wellbeing, communication about reading, really deeply embedded across the school. Their approaches in the classroom are really inclusive of children's other languages. So you see multilingualism as a feature all across the school. Kids are using their own languages to talk to their peers, to talk about what they're learning, to negotiate their school world when they're still learning English and that's visible in the environment for the school as well. The linguistic landscape represents the students who are in the school. The parent community's welcomed in really positive ways, they've just built a multilingual library, they're building it. They still, you know, could use more books, but the kids can go and take out a book in their own language and sit and read it with their friends. It's really, you know, it's completely holistic with the child at the center, everything the child brings is considered as an asset and then how do we leverage those assets for them to feel comfortable, secure and then learning well in their environment and I think it's just, it's a regular UK state school, English state school.
[00:02:59] Ed Finch: No special funding.
[00:03:00] Eowyn Crisfield: No special funding, it's in Newham, it's not a particularly rich area, so funding is always problematic. But, you know, just what they've done is create an environment where every child who comes in the door has the opportunity to thrive in a curriculum that's designed to meet their needs. So they've got the core that they need to do through the English national curriculum, but they've enhanced that in so many really great ways by pairing it down to what is absolutely key for the learning and then what do we need to build around that so that our kids can access that learning really, effectively and it's a magical school to be in, in lots of different ways. It's the kind of school I see internationally a lot more that have great funding, but to see it in that context is really amazing and they've also, they've developed partnerships with researchers, so they've got researchers coming in and supporting them and they're trying to, you know, share that with the wider community and with the wider borough, so that other schools can...
[00:03:55] Ed Finch: Beautiful.
[00:03:56] Eowyn Crisfield: ...roll that into their own approaches without having to recreate everything.
[00:04:01] Ed Finch: Is that the, work of one inspiring leader who saw it was important or...?
[00:04:05] Eowyn Crisfield: It is, it's the work of the, I believe her title now is Head of Multilingualism, her name is Sophia Amann. She used to be an ESOL teacher and then she came to the school to develop their provisions for EAL. It's the work of the whole school, but I would say she's been the inspiration behind it. The person who has said this is what we need to do and this is how we'll do it and has held their hand through the process. But alongside that has been a series of school leaders who are willing to listen and willing to make those changes and all the classroom teachers and support staff who are also willing to make those changes and you know, I happen to be there over lunch and even their canteen I've never seen food that looked that colorful in a school canteen.
[00:04:45] Ed Finch: I didn't even get an invitation to this!
[00:04:48] Eowyn Crisfield: Yeah, absolutely it is and you know, you look at the plate of the food that the kids were eating and you could see reflected in it the cultures of the different kids who were there. It was vibrant, it was colorful, it was food the kids are going to want to eat and then, you know, through that they'll be better in the classroom, they'll be nourished, you know, their soul is being nourished, their body's being nourished and all of that will lead to better outcomes for those kids who arguably have, you know, a really very steep learning curve.
[00:05:16] Ed Finch: You've got lots of pupils at that school, you're saying lots of them are new to the UK, new to that school, new to Newham and then some probably who are second and third generation and presumably some I know new and reasonably well quite. So there'll be some white working class and there is quite a lot of diversity in their area and so social diversity as well, isn't there? Your expertise is around bilingualism, but a lot of those children aren't bilingual yet.
[00:05:40] Eowyn Crisfield: We call them emergent billinguals.
[00:05:42] Ed Finch: An emergent bilingual and he says, so is there a sort of a matrix of vocabulary that you would use to talk about children at different stages on their language journey?
[00:05:53] Eowyn Crisfield: So it's a really interesting question and it's one of the problematic areas that we have currently in England is there is no official guidance and documentation around English as an additional language in terms of tracking proficiency, reporting proficiency and so it's up to every school to decide. The framework that they use and that I talk about is developed by the Bell Foundation. They've created a document for tracking EAL progression that talks about proficiency in English. So band A is beginner and band E is fluent all the way through. So we can use that to talk about their proficiency in English, which is really important. If we don't know their...
[00:06:28] Ed Finch: But we don't know their proficiency now. So I've had children come into a class who were fully fluent and brilliant readers and brilliant writers in another language and who needed to be inducted into English, but no doubt at all, we knew very well that they were fully literate, just not in English yet and I've had children come in and where I had no idea about their experience of schooling before they'd come to the UK. They may have had no experience of schooling, they may have had some partial and so I wasn't, is this a literate child? I have no idea, I have no idea. I can't get any information from the parents. They say he's been to school, but then they seem to be on the back foot anyway and these are really different kids, and my fear is that in our system, because it's not systematised generally and because over the past, I'm going to say decade, support for English as an additional language has disappeared from our schools. When I started teaching, we had a full time teacher in our not particularly large primary whose sole job was working with children with English as an additional language and tooling them up and over the course of time, that job got put down to two days a week and then disappeared entirely, which I think is broadly typical across the countries, am I right?
[00:07:37] Eowyn Crisfield: Absolutely. So the designation EAL as it is currently in England, is an irrelevance. EAL is defined as any child who is exposed to a language beyond English at home. You know, largely speaking and that runs the gamut of children who speak English fluently to children who have no English at all and so when a child comes in, for example and it's noted somewhere in their file, this child has EAL, it's not meaningful in any way.
[00:08:04] Ed Finch: Doesn't mean anything, no.
[00:08:05] Eowyn Crisfield: It means nothing at all, even in terms of their proficiency in English. But also there's really, there's a shrinking body of expertise in England overall, because EAL doesn't form core content for ITE, for any kind of ITE, whether it's a full Bachelor of Education or a PGCE or a Teach First, there is no requirement for any kind of tuition about EAL, but also you can't do an EAL specialisation anymore. You used to very briefly be able to do a PGCE and EAL and you can't anymore and so that means that the people who are really fully qualified are a shrinking pool, retiring fast and so when schools are looking for expertise, it's getting more and more difficult to find.
[00:08:50] Ed Finch: And so for the teacher in the classroom, and whether that's a newly qualified teacher or a teacher who's been doing it for a while, chances are a child can join the class with, you know, with English as an additional language. They haven't got the tools to figure out where that child is right now and they tend to fall back on the, well, I'm going to let them struggle and magically in about six months they'll start speaking fluently and we'll all be amazed at this small miracle of the human mind. Am I being overly cynical or is that roughly what you see?
[00:09:20] Eowyn Crisfield: That is roughly what we see because, you know, there's no knowledge base in schools, unless there's a teacher in the school that is quite passionate about it, has gone out and found out themselves, read something, joined an organization, learned from someone else. There is, in a lot of schools, no expertise at all. So they just don't know what to do and so even the basic knowledge, like, that it takes five to nine years to become academically proficient in a new language. Five to nine years is not what most classroom teachers think, they think...
[00:09:48] Ed Finch: They think it magically happens, that they'll be functional in six months and about a year down the line they'll catch up.
[00:09:54] Eowyn Crisfield: They'll catch up. Yeah and so all of those, misunderstandings feed into misdiagnosis of learning difficulties, of reading difficulties, of children who have behavioral issues, often the behavioral issues are just they're acting out because they don't understand anything and so without that kind of core of understanding within schools of what are the lived experiences of children who are learning English as an additional language, a lot of really unfortunate things happen for those children. But there's just a lack of any kind of systematic training, development, focus on EAL in any of the current government documentation that means that schools don't have support or pressure to know what they're doing because it's not even in the offset framework.
[00:10:41] Ed Finch: No, it's not, no.
[00:10:42] Eowyn Crisfield: So you can have an Ofsted inspection and they may never ask you about EAL.
[00:10:45] Ed Finch: And they probably, most Ofsted inspectors are serving school leaders and they serve in this same system, they probably haven't a clue.
[00:10:54] Eowyn Crisfield: Or if they do, it's because they've some come from somewhere with great practice.
[00:10:57] Ed Finch: Yeah.
[00:10:58] Eowyn Crisfield: But yeah, absolutely and I think that kind of lack of awareness within the wider system...
[00:11:03] Ed Finch: Do you see countries which are doing this better? If you were ranking us, would we be near the top? Somewhere around the middle?
[00:11:09] Eowyn Crisfield: I I think it really varies. There is an immense amount of good practice happening in individual schools in England.
[00:11:15] Ed Finch: And we like to say this on Primary Futures, that we often talk about issues, but we always acknowledge that we know there's some school somewhere, not far from you, who are doing this great. So one of the first things you'd like to do is go and see that school and go. Oh, I see. Okay.
[00:11:29] Eowyn Crisfield: There are absolutely pockets of good practice, but they are no thanks to anyone currently leading education. They are absolutely down to the people.
[00:11:38] Ed Finch: From a school developed good practice a decade ago or more and they're managing to maintain that or there's someone really passionate in there.
[00:11:46] Eowyn Crisfield: Absolutely, yeah. Well, internationally a lot of the countries that I work in have mandated reporting on proficiency in the school language, which makes a big difference because if you're reporting on it and being tracked on it, you'll pay a little more attention to children's development. I've been working consistently with Jersey, island of Jersey, not New Jersey, over four years now to, kind of do a complete review and overhaul of their approaches to EAL. They need, they now have a language policy which sits over the entire education sector in Jersey that dictates what the rights and responsibilities are of all of the stakeholders in terms of...
[00:12:25] Ed Finch: People would assume that Jersey was reasonably monocultural and...
[00:12:29] Eowyn Crisfield: I assumed the same when got that phone call, absolutely, yeah. They have really very high net migration. In fact, they have, so they have a historical agreement with the island of Madeira going back over a hundred years for ease of immigration to work in the agricultural and hospitality industries. That's slowly shifting due to, say political changes over the last years. So they, you know, increasing migration from Poland, from Romania, from other places around the world, but some schools in Jersey, some of the city schools have sixty, sixty five per cent of children who don't speak English at home. It's really surprising.
[00:13:06] Ed Finch: So hospitality, I mean, that's true. I was in the North of Scotland last week for a family wedding and the hotel I was at was run entirely by East Europeans and Asians. You know, I think we're in a remote part of rural Scotland. People don't think that's where you're going to get your EAL, but I imagine that local school, it's in the Scottish system, not ours, and the Scottish system is tooled up differently in some ways. But it makes you think that this is a problem, which I think a lazy eye would imagine is an urban problem, but actually is not.
[00:13:36] Eowyn Crisfield: It's not, no it's really not and I think the challenge of that particular misunderstanding is that we often see good practice in urban settings because they have a critical mass and it's the rural areas that struggle a lot more because the schools are smaller, the resources are less and it's a growing demographic there rather than they've always been there. Exactly, whereas in London, you know, there's always been multilingualism in London schools going back, you know, decades and decades and so, they may have
[00:14:06] Ed Finch: They've developed some sort of good practice.
[00:14:08] Eowyn Crisfield: You would imagine, yeah, But it's a growing demographic in other parts where, and so Jersey, this particular demographic started growing in the 1980s. With ease of movement, those migrant workers started bringing their families with them and having families there.
[00:14:24] Ed Finch: So rather than dad goes and works there for two years and sends the money home, he goes, Okay, actually, we bring...
[00:14:29] Eowyn Crisfield: Absolutely. Yeah, so they do have, their statistics actually mirror very closely England, which is one to five to one in six kids in schools currently has English as an additional language. But they've now. overhauled that system completely because all of the schools now are required to have this new language policy as a part of their kind of their practice and their action plan. They've overhauled the system.
[00:14:50] Ed Finch: They've done it. It's one of those things that you value what gets measured and we don't like that very much generally and we think that it bends things out of shape. But we can see sometimes it bends things in a necessary direction.
[00:15:02] Eowyn Crisfield: Absolutely because now they have data they can track what's happening with those kids in different ways than what they could before when they were using the generic English. They were using the generic English definition. They weren't reporting on proficiency in English, in a consistent way, much like happens in England. But now, their data system looks completely different and they can track school by school. What are the educational experiences of these children?
[00:15:27] Ed Finch: So what are the effects on the child? I mean, broadly, every child's different and of course we know that, but broadly, what are the effects on a child coming into a school where their needs as an additional language learner aren't addressed? Beyond purely access to the curriculum.
[00:15:41] Eowyn Crisfield: So, access to the curriculum is the biggest one, but there are also, you know, issues to do with identity development, socio emotional well being, where you don't feel comfortable or confident in your environment, there's also a lot of language loss that happens. We know that there's a very strong relationship between continued development in the home language and learning of English at school. The better their home language is, the better they'll learn English. A child who comes into a school that doesn't value their home language, that doesn't show them that you should be using it, you should be proud of it, we like it too. We'll start pushing back against that, they'll start saying things like, Mom, don't speak to me in Portuguese at school, it's embarrassing and that loss of the home.
[00:16:20] Ed Finch: And at home as well. I mean, I know multiple children, I'm thinking of three of them, just like at the very top of my head now, who are not using fluent home languages at home because we're in England now and I don't want to be a weirdo. Mum's English isn't so great and she's not being taught it at school, even nominally, you know, so...
[00:16:40] Eowyn Crisfield: Absolutely and you know, there are unintended consequences of that where often than the parents start using English with their children, no matter what their level of English and you know, you can parent a six year old. in not very strong English, but you can't parent a 13 year old in not very strong English. So we know there are, it leads to ruptures in the family, kind of the family unit, where the parents no longer can communicate effectively with their teenagers about parenting and emotions and all, I mean, you know what it's like to communicate with teenagers, you need to be at your best with that, that loss of the home languages.
[00:17:14] Ed Finch: You need a really rich vocabulary. My friend Graeme Andre, I think, worked on a project, became a TV show and he looked at young people's vocabulary of emotion and he found this was a monocultural class on the Isle of Wight. He found that the girls had quite a broad set of vocabularies for talking about their feelings, and the boys had one word which was angry. If they were anxious, they were angry and if they were lonely, that was angry too and if they were hungry, that was angry. That was the one word they had. These were kids who were growing up in an English medium home. So if mum doesn't have the vocabulary for her emotions, you stand no chance at all, do you?
[00:17:49] Eowyn Crisfield: Yeah, absolutely and globally, there's a lot of research on that, how it impacts family development and the ability to parent well and, you know, the consequences on that child later in life are loss of opportunities. We know that being bilingual is beneficial for your university opportunities, your work opportunities, your career, people who are bilingual and use that in their work life end up being paid up to 25 percent more, statistics will show. Yeah.
[00:18:16] Ed Finch: 25 percent more?
[00:18:18] Eowyn Crisfield: For the same jobs if they're hired because of their bilingual ability and so you think, actually, we should be not focusing just on English as an additional language, we should be focusing on helping children become bilingual because that's where we know all the wins come, the cognitive wins.
[00:18:32] Ed Finch: So that's a significant difference, isn't it? So at the moment, a new child joins my class. I'm like, how quickly can I get them to another words, toilet, home time, break, coat, get them functional in by the end of next week and so that a natural fact, a little bit of time enriching their sense that we appreciate the home language, which isn't hard to do at the base level, if we learn how to say hello and good morning in their language, we're already acknowledging that's something we value and if we put some key vocab in there, language on the walls, hopefully we're celebrating that as well?
[00:19:04] Eowyn Crisfield: Yeah, absolutely. It's about...
[00:19:06] Ed Finch: It's basic bits.
[00:19:07] Eowyn Crisfield: It's just, there are basic bits we can do to show that we value multilingualism as a skill and that we value other languages and that we want children to keep using their other languages.
[00:19:17] Ed Finch: I'm detecting from your accent and I might be wrong, I think you yourself may not have grown up in the United Kingdom, am I right?
[00:19:24] Eowyn Crisfield: I did not, I grew up in northern Canada. Although when I go to Northern Canada now, people say, so where are you from?
[00:19:32] Ed Finch: in Canada, of course, you know, you, you've got the Quebecois and you've got immigration at quite high levels. You've got a large indigenous population. Does that mean that bilingualism is understood and welcomed more or is English as monolithic there as it is here?
[00:19:46] Eowyn Crisfield: It depends on where you are. So where I grew up in Northern Canada, I can't recall meeting someone who spoke another language until I was thirteen years old.
[00:19:53] Ed Finch: Thirteen?
[00:19:54] Eowyn Crisfield: Thirteen years old. It was a very English settlement. Now, a lot of people came from other backgrounds... Or they still used them at home and it just wasn't something that was featured in schools. But there have been huge shifts. Canada has, you know, Heritage Languages Act, which supports the propagation of heritage languages and culture and so community groups can apply for funding to run community language schools and community centers and so I would say in the cities, there's now, much like the UK, the cities are incredibly multilingual. What happens in the various rural areas will depend on the people who have landed there and what their approaches are. But I would say it's one of the biggest misconceptions about Canada that most people are French English bilingual. Very few people are French English bilingual. French or English and a lot of people speak another language, so it's English something bilingual or French something bilingual. I am French English bilingual now. I didn't grow up that way and so I came to bilingualism later in life.
[00:21:00] Ed Finch: What has it offered you as an adult that?
[00:21:02] Eowyn Crisfield: Oh, I mean, I've lived and worked in you know, several different countries off the back of being able to learn other languages and I can comfortably give lectures in English and in French. And so I work a lot in Switzerland where I do teacher training in French. My Dutch is not as strong, I don't do teacher training in Dutch, but I can do questions in Dutch. But also it's just a different way of seeing the world. And it's a different way of going into schools and interacting with pupils in different languages that model that bilingualism is positive and they need those role models to see that, you know, it's okay if Dr. Crisfield comes in and she makes a mistake in French and that's okay, then it's okay if I give it a try and I make a mistake in French too. so...
[00:21:43] Ed Finch: An opportunity to model vulnerability and humility, a theme that's gone through these programs is the need for humility. We can't be experts in everything, particularly in primary world where we're teaching all the subjects. I didn't do a degree in all the subjects. I don't even have an A level in all the subjects, but I'm doing my best. Okay, we'll do our best together.
[00:22:02] Eowyn Crisfield: And I think if there's one really powerful thing that teachers can do to shift the experiences of their children with English as an additional language is to become language learners themselves. Teach me how to count in your language, teach me how to say the morning in your language. Listen to me make an error in pronunciation and you can correct...
[00:22:19] Ed Finch: And listen to my humility when I say I'm not quite sure I've got that right.
[00:22:22] Eowyn Crisfield: Absolutely, absolutely and that's actually really positive to be a language learner and to be a risk taker in languages and that gives the students that boost as well.
[00:22:31] Ed Finch: And I'm sure...
[00:22:32] Eowyn Crisfield: They see themselves as doing something that's powerful and good, rather than being seen as less than. We have a tendency to see students with EAL by the limits of their English rather than by the extent of everything else they bring into the classroom.
[00:22:46] Ed Finch: One of those great examples of the deficit model, isn't it? Very frequently when we've got children coming from desperate communities, they're already speaking three or four languages. English is yet another.
[00:22:57] Eowyn Crisfield: Yet in schools we say things like, Oh, that child has no language or that, you know, that child can't do anything yet and it's like, well, that's absolutely not correct. We have to frame it, that child is emergent in English, but what else do they already have and what else can they already do?
[00:23:14] Ed Finch: There's very frequently a sort of a folk model where they say, well the children up to the age of some age learn languages by magic and they absorb them as they did their mother tongue and then this bridge closes over, you know and after that you have to learn grammar and drill vocabulary and things. Is there any truth to that?
[00:23:32] Eowyn Crisfield: Not really, so that actually conflates two different things, simultaneous bilingualism, which is learning two languages or more from birth, we do know that seems to happen, I hate to say by magic because it's not, but it happens cognitively without any additional load to the child. But that initial window is six months to a year. After that, children, like adults, differentiate out into children who are better language learners, more interested language learners, kids who struggle, and we see that in schools. You can take two four year old children in with no English at all, and in six months, they'll be fundamentally very different from each other, potentially. So that kind of children as sponges myth is absolutely just a myth. What we do know is that the circumstances of young children are more rich for language acquisition and less pressured. So if you're learning language as a four year old, you're interacting with things in a very concrete way, people are speaking slowly to you. They're using a lot of repetitive language, people are reading you stories every day, which is great for language acquisition and you don't have a job and you don't have, you know, to make dinner. So really, you've got a lot of time and a lot of great input for language acquisition. That becomes different as kids get older. So when we start teaching kids languages at the end of Key Stage 2, we're like, well, now we're going to give you a test. So it's no longer, would you like to explore and learn to say some things in French? Because that would be fun. It's like, now we're going to learn some French and we're going to give you a test.
[00:24:55] Ed Finch: Yeah, but I think we would see that with quite young people as I can imagine that school in case stage one So, oh, we've got a young child, they've just joined us from Ukraine, we better teach them some structures, we'd better teach them some vocabulary, we'll do this with a worksheet that we've downloaded from a website and what you're saying is that the stuff that's really working is that exploratory and play based and experiential stuff, probably would be true for me as an adult if only I had the time.
[00:25:21] Eowyn Crisfield: Yes, if you were given really high quality input in a context in which you needed to understand and use the language, you would be able to do that.
[00:25:30] Ed Finch: I would have some motivation, I would have a high level of challenge and a very low level of threat as Mary Maya would put it.
[00:25:37] Eowyn Crisfield: Yeah, yeah and so there are, I mean, I moved to the Netherlands, I learned Dutch just by using it in the communities. Is my Dutch perfect? No. But can I do what I need to do? Absolutely.
[00:25:47] Ed Finch: Do you think that you're especially good at language learning or do you think that you're quite motivated?
[00:25:51] Eowyn Crisfield: So there is a measure of language aptitude. Some people are better language learners than others. We know that's a measurable, it's a measurable attribute that's made up of your phonemic awareness, which is your ability to hear and make sounds, your syntactic coding ability, which is your ability to sort things out into.
[00:26:06] Ed Finch: That's another bit of our human pattern seeking.
[00:26:08] Eowyn Crisfield: Exactly. The pattern seeking, absolutely and the third piece, which is the one that is in a way age dependent, is memory. So, you have to hear a lot of words, process them through your working memory and into your long term memory. We know that adults are not as good at that piece, because as we get older, our memory isn't as good. But as a measure of aptitude, there are definitely people who are better at learning languages. I am, I would say, quite good and I don't mean that in a cocky way. I just connect with languages. I get them. Don't ask me about math!
[00:26:37] Ed Finch: You're interested in them, aren't you? I mean, you're curious, you're...
[00:26:39] Eowyn Crisfield: Yeah, well and that's why I do what I do, you know, it's no accident that I ended up doing this because I'm really interested in how we can improve language learning and teaching in schools, not just EAL, but also, what you call, you know, MFL, Modern Foreign Languages, in the UK could be done so much better.
[00:26:57] Ed Finch: Such amazing changes of practice in that area. I mean, what a rich first half. I've been fascinated by that. I need a break. I'm sure the listeners do too. So let's go away for a couple of minutes and come back to imagine a better future.
So before the break, we were talking about how things are at the moment and You shared some beautiful stories about a school you visited in London and it's clear that there's really good practice going around, but we know it's patchy. So I'd like now to imagine the world five years from now when we've all been pulling on the right strings, pushing on the right doors and working together. So what could we have in five years? What could that look like in our schools?
[00:27:39] Eowyn Crisfield: So I think the first thing we need is really clear, strong guidance from the whole education sector. So from the Department of Education on down, that there's guidance around EAL and multilingualism in the inspection framework, in the early career, what is it called? The ECT? Framework? ECR?
[00:28:01] Ed Finch: Early Career Teachers, but it's the framework.
[00:28:03] Eowyn Crisfield: Framework that they, ECF.
[00:28:05] Ed Finch: Is what we're struggling towards. Yeah.
[00:28:07] Eowyn Crisfield: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:28:08] Ed Finch: Because that's absent now.
[00:28:09] Eowyn Crisfield: It is absent. It's absent categorically across the board and so what they say is it comes under meeting the needs of all students.
[00:28:18] Ed Finch: Okay.
[00:28:19] Eowyn Crisfield: And so if you have students with EAL, you should be meeting their needs. But in the absence of any direct guidance, it's down to schools to decide the priority of...
[00:28:29] Ed Finch: and that pushes it back onto a deficit, doesn't it? But it says in the same way that, you know, I've got a child with a physical disability. It sounds like it's an opportunity cost rather than,
[00:28:40] Eowyn Crisfield: Absolutely and you know, the funding also, as it's been removed categorically, you know, from every single framework, the funding is no longer ring fenced either. So schools do get funding for students with EAL for the first couple of years, but it's no longer ring fenced funding to be used for those students, which means that there's no mandate to make sure you're using it.
[00:29:02] Ed Finch: As a head teacher myself, I didn't know very well if there's some money wafting around that I can put towards the things I need to buy, I'm going to and then I'm gonna put my hand in my heart and I say, well, this benefits all the pupils. So, you know, and a rising tide lifts all boats.
[00:29:15] Eowyn Crisfield: Yeah, absolutely and you know, given the state of school budgets, I completely understand that. There are absolutely competing priorities. It's also, it's increasingly difficult to hire any staff with EAL expertise because it's not in the ITE, it's not in any of the current teach, you know, initial teacher training provisions and you can't do a specialisation in it. I mean, if one in five or one in six children in English schools have English as an additional language, you should be able to do a PGCE in that because that's an expertise that schools need.
[00:29:45] Ed Finch: A fifth. That's, you know, a fifth.
[00:29:47] Eowyn Crisfield: A fifth in primary schools,
[00:29:49] Ed Finch: That is, I mean, that is extraordinary when we think about it. A fifth of our pupils have English as an additional language and we can't do a specialism in that. So in five years, we want a profession that recognises that a fifth of our kid are EAL, we better take this seriously and then they'll say, what do we need to do? Part of it, you'll say, okay, well, you know, actually no, none of us really like inspection, but we know that it kind of has to happen. There has to be some sort of quality assurance and so fine, if it's effective for our pupils, it's right that it's in there and then they'll say, well fine, but I don't speak another language myself. I'm not a confident language speaker, what do I do? What resources would we think needed to be there to make sure...?
[00:30:31] Eowyn Crisfield: So you don't need to be a confident speaker of another language to know how to support children who speak other languages. That knowledge base, building into schools, the knowledge base, so at least every school, has at least one staff member who's specialised in bilingualism and development in schools, not EAL.
[00:30:47] Ed Finch: In a school with 250 pupils, it's got 25 teachers on the books, fine. Where I've been most recently working in Devon, I'm working with schools which might have 12 pupils and you know, two members of staff. In which case, it is tricky in those situations. I think it's...
[00:31:02] Eowyn Crisfield: It is, but if two of those twelve pupils have English as an additional language. You need that expertise. It doesn't matter how few or how many. I mean, that's a big percentage of your school, two out of 12. It's still falling within that kind of one in six and so you know, the extent of your expertise will vary according to the cohort in your school. But if you look, for example, at what Jersey's done, every school in Jersey now has a multilingual learner lead teacher.
[00:31:27] Ed Finch: Great and it's not assumed that adult is a multilingual person themselves.
[00:31:31] Eowyn Crisfield: No, the vast majority are monolingual English speakers, but they are mandated to understand and develop provisions for those children and so in smaller schools, that's a smaller role. And in bigger schools, it's a bigger role.
[00:31:45] Ed Finch: Like everything else, isn't it? Yes.
Exactly,
[00:31:47] Eowyn Crisfield: but recognises that, you know, the fewer children in the smaller outlying schools sometimes actually need somebody more than the kids who are in a really multilingual school where they get lots of support from their peers.
[00:31:59] Ed Finch: And in a small school, it can change very quickly. You know, you go into a small school, twenty pupils, let's say. That's not uncommon in England, there's lots of schools as small as that. A family moves into the area because of agriculture or because of the hospitality industry. Suddenly there's five children who have English as an additional language, this is a bomb going off in a small school. So we have an adult there who goes, Well, I don't even pretend to be an expert, but I know where to go for help. So where would they go for help?
[00:32:25] Eowyn Crisfield: So right now, again, it's patchwork because there isn't really you know, a consistent approach across the network. NALDIC, which is the EAL Subject Association for the UK, has recently been working with the University of Reading and the University of Edinburgh on some online teacher training provisions and on a MOOC. There are some good MOOCs you can do on FutureLearn.
[00:32:47] Ed Finch: Remind our listeners what a MOOC is. 'cause they might not know.
[00:32:50] Eowyn Crisfield: It is a Massive Online Open Course. Is that right? Did I get it in the right order?
[00:32:57] Ed Finch: I think you are right. I'm looking around the studio to see if I'm getting any nods, yeah. But these huge courses which you, can log onto because that, and that's an amazing resource. If they do that and do it well.
[00:33:08] Eowyn Crisfield: FutureLearn has ones that you can do for free. You don't get the certificate if you do it for free, but you get the knowledge and that's what's really important and you can make your way through and you know, over a few weeks, you've actually developed your understanding to a point where you have a sense of, okay, how could we move forward with these kids? So that kind of basic level of knowledge, and then you...
[00:33:26] Ed Finch: So five years from now, that could be embedded, that could be great and then we could basically say, listen, in every school someone's done this. Let's just assume, same as we now assume every school has got a mental health first aider, for example. It's not anybody's job title, but it's something they do and when we need them, we're glad we gave them that day off to attend the training.
[00:33:47] Eowyn Crisfield: I think the other thing that needs to happen is that we need a mandate from the Department for Education to report on English, proficiency in English, because we can't track students and know what their outcomes are without tracking their development of English. We know that ultimately proficiency in English is the factor that correlates most strongly with their success in GCSEs and so we need to know how they're doing.
[00:34:08] Ed Finch: Just shouldn't surprise us to know that, should it? It's like you say that and there's me going, Oh, blimey! And then thinking, I've got to read the paper. A lot of friends will have contacted you about the most recent SATS reasoning paper. I don't know if you've been involved in that conversation, but a lot of my colleagues said that was an English comprehension test dressed up as a math test and actually the math was very simple. Actually the problems were very simple, but the language they were dressed up in were very simple. Was impenetrable to anybody who wasn't a very proficient English reader and writer, let alone an 11 year old, who's probably, you know, going to scrape a standardized score of a hundred.
[00:34:46] Eowyn Crisfield: Yeah, absolutely and you know, that's really impactful on those students who do those tests and don't do well because that goes with them into their secondary school and decides what sets they're put in and all of those things they may have been brilliant at math and now they're in bottom set because of the English in that test.
[00:35:03] Ed Finch: Yeah, and those kids who joined our school three years ago, and they seem to be functionally up and running, they're doing fine. So we've signed them off as EAL, they're fine and you're saying that it's a minimum of five to nine years actually, but we're very good at masking.
[00:35:20] Eowyn Crisfield: Right, or it only comes through in tasks like that where on an everyday basis, they are fine, you know, they're kind of, their social language is great, they sound good, they've got a good accent because kids are good at that. But it's the deeper level where cognition and language are...
[00:35:36] Ed Finch: 5-years from now, the people who are writing those tests, maybe we won't have those tests anymore, is that too outrageous a thought? But in five years, we'd like actually some intelligent thought around that.
[00:35:46] Eowyn Crisfield: Absolutely. If you're testing math, test math.
[00:35:49] Ed Finch: Now, one thing we're setting up in this podcast, which, you know, it's going to happen. If I appoint you onto our independent curriculum commission, I would like to say, Dr. Crisfield, what changes are you gonna insist upon? What's gonna have to be baked in? And that could be right across the group, we're not talking about the English curriculum here, what needs to change in our curriculum to support EAL learners?
[00:36:09] Eowyn Crisfield: So, I think beyond supporting EAL learners, supporting bilingual learners, they are two very different things. There's what you do for the kids who are still developing English and there's what you continue to do for children who are bilingual and those are, they're complementary but they're not the same.
[00:36:23] Ed Finch: But in a primary school, because we know it takes five to nine years for children to become truly bilingual, if they've joined as an English learner in year one. If that was where they started learning their English, however good they were in their mother tongue at that point, then are we ever going to sign them off as effectively bilingual within our primary school? Or are they always going to be EAL if it's taken five years to get...
[00:36:46] Eowyn Crisfield: so I think that the terminology is really important. So again, you know, going back to the work in Jersey, what we've done is we've created a new terminology. The term multilingual learner is a designation given to any child as they enter the school system who speaks a language beyond English. So when my children walked into the schools here, they spoke French and Dutch and English, they're designated as a multilingual learner and that says something about their profile. They did not need English has an additional language provision, they were fluent English speakers. So EAL is a provision some students receive in order to support their learning of English. But the Multilingual Learner Designate tells us other important things. It tells us those children have a different worldview, those children have different experiences. When we look at our school and we look at the stretch of kind of cultures and worldviews, we want to make sure that our curriculum represents those children. So if we're doing a unit on science and ecosystems, we say to the kids, go and research an ecosystem somewhere where your grandparents came from and come back and report to us what that ecosystem is like. So they're all going off, they're doing some research with their grandparents about an ecosystem in Sri Lanka, in Poland, in Canada, for my kids, wherever they were, they're all bringing that back. The science learning is enriched by looking at ecosystems from all over the world, perspectives are enriched by recognising that ecosystems exist outside our current context and all of those kids have had a really meaningful interaction with science and culture and geography and language and so it's about how we design a curriculum that represents the children in our school.
[00:38:23] Ed Finch: I mean, it's, if you said, you know, at the moment in the existing National Curriculum document, there's a stuff about the depth of study and it's almost a comment there saying study in this subject should represent the wealth of heritage of the pupils in the cohort.
[00:38:37] Eowyn Crisfield: Absolutely, absolutely.
[00:38:38] Ed Finch: Which is a challenge to a teacher who is used to doing the rainforest in Brazil every time and it says, well I've got a Tamil child, I've got a, you know, I've got a child from Central Africa, maybe I need to shift my model by five degrees.
[00:38:50] Eowyn Crisfield: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:38:51] Ed Finch: That means we couldn't, well, the impact of that would be that schools which have said we've done all our planning now, our curriculum is sorted pretty much, it's on the Google Drive, you just download the slides and the sheets for next week's lesson. It challenges that because it means teachers need to be informed and curious about the pupils they're teaching.
[00:39:14] Eowyn Crisfield: Absolutely, but that's what a good curriculum is about.
[00:39:17] Ed Finch: So I would argue, but you know, I don't think I've got everybody on my side, maybe it...
[00:39:21] Eowyn Crisfield: I mean, but imagine the difference. You're doing poetry with your year fives and everybody's reading the same poems and you're all talking about the same poems and the same poems you did last year and the same poems you do next year, imagine instead you have kids with different backgrounds in your class. They bring in a poem written in another language and a translation in English and you all talk about, what do people write about in poems from different parts of the world? These are our English poems, and they all focus on the landscape, or whatever it is. You've brought in a poem from Syria. What do Syrian poets write about? How do they phrase things? Do they use iambic pentameter? Or not? Or whatever it is that your focus is of the learning about poetry.
[00:40:03] Ed Finch: How about phonemic awareness? Because, you know, my children in year four probably aren't going to talk about iambic pentameter, but they might talk about the sound of the, and the music of the language.
[00:40:12] Eowyn Crisfield: And rhyme and what does rhyme mean? And rhyme...
[00:40:14] Ed Finch: Hear rhymes when you're listening in another language? Do all languages use rhyme? Some languages are really rich in rhyme, some languages aren't. Does that change the way it sounds? I mean, when we're talking about tonal languages, you know, and we start to get our heads a tiny bit around a tonal language, you know, and Harry said, well, this poem has a tune to it, you know, makes us think about our English prosody. So we are going to rewrite this curriculum, but it's a small rewrite, because it's just saying, listen, whatever we do, we're going to be appreciative of the range and variety of heritage and backgrounds of the pupils in our class and we'll include that where we can. That's only going to make things more interesting for everyone. We are going to put into our, whatever we replace Ofsted with, or enrich Ofsted with, however we do that, we're going to say, listen, schools need to be able to account in some way for how they're addressing this. We would love to see in every school that there is someone who's responsibility for the bilingual or EAL learners and has access to resources, which don't need to be central government because there's people who are good at doing this stuff, but they need access to resources and we want those beautiful schools like the one you described, which really embrace bilingualism and multilingualism as something as something to be celebrated, because if we celebrate it, the kids know to value it and they'll value it at home as well, that will only be good for them.
[00:41:27] Eowyn Crisfield: Absolutely, I think just to push the envelope a tiny bit farther, I often get asked, but what about schools that don't have any students who, are from diverse backgrounds, so they just get to do what they're doing? And I would say no, there's an opportunity to get in early in primary school to open kids eyes to the variety that is around us and there are a lot of great resources you can use for that, even if you've not got any children in your classroom that represent that variety. There's an amazing set of resources called WoLLoW. Which stands for World of Languages and Languages of the World. It's a kind of a full term curriculum that's been designed to tune kids into languages and develop curiosity about languages. So you look at different scripts and you look at, you know, translation and transliteration and what does Greek look like and you look at what are the connections across languages and it's a really great resource to use in monolingual classrooms to show kids that, you know, learning a language isn't scary or something to be worried about. All languages are connected. If I look at French, I can find words I already know and to really develop that sense in monolingual classes of languages as being something valuable as they connect to other worldviews, other cultures, other ways of doing and being.
[00:42:41] Ed Finch: So if there's a school out there who are looking at their curriculum now and they're thinking about what should we do with modern foreign languages, it's really important that children have a modern foreign language. Shall we buy La Jolie Ronde or shall we invest in the, Latin or whatever it is? You might say, go and look at WoLLoW. Actually, learning for languages is not about learning some phrases in a language, it's about learning an attitude or...
[00:43:04] Eowyn Crisfield: Absolutely and WoLLoW is the place to start for that and you can move from WoLLoW into a language, but WoLLoW is the hook.
[00:43:11] Ed Finch: I mean, what a rich conversation, but what can we do if there's teachers or school leaders or curriculum leads listening to this who go like, okay, this sounds like the right thing to be doing for our school, for our pupils, just for the kids in my class, let's see what's one or two things that they could do on Monday morning or after half term or starting from September to make a difference.
[00:43:33] Eowyn Crisfield: So it depends on what their starting point is, but I'd say first of all, know the kids in your school. A lot of schools don't even know the languages that are represented by their children's school. They're like, oh yeah, that student, I think they've got something else at home, but I'm not sure what it is, I saw written on a class list once that a child spoke African. It's like, wow, okay. And when pushed, they said, oh, I think it's Nigerian. And I'm like, also not a language, closer and so I think, know your students. Absolutely know your students and their profiles, be curious, and then share that curiosity with your kids. Be curious about their languages, let them know that you're interested, let them teach you languages, let them teach each other languages, develop an environment in which languages are not problematic.
[00:44:14] Ed Finch: Yeah, so what that child who, for whatever reason and it's not your fault, but you're the teacher who's got the issue in front of you, that child who is ashamed of their home language because it's a minority language or because it sounds weird or whatever. How do you induct that child safely?
[00:44:31] Eowyn Crisfield: So you work around it, you work with the other kids who aren't yet embarrassed or ashamed of their language to start really showing that we as a class or we as a school, value multilingualism as a skill and hope that child will gently pick it up and then I would also probably look at connecting with the parents and saying, you know, we really value your child's language and we would like them to value it. Can we work with you to find some books you can read with them? Can you come into the school and do a story time in your language? Whatever you need to kind of boost the street cred, if you will, of that language amongst the child's peers.
[00:45:05] Ed Finch: And individual teachers could go to WoLLoW and look at that resource as a way...
[00:45:09] Eowyn Crisfield: Yeah, absolutely. So WoLLoW's really good. There's another resource called WAMCam, which is We Are Multilingual Cambridge, that's designed for multilingual schools who are at the beginning of the journey. It's the same thing. It's a suite of resources that you can use to teach through that help you profile your school and get your kids talking about languages and identifying as multilingual. So which one you choose, you could do both, they're both great.
[00:45:31] Ed Finch: So one's more of an evaluative tool and one's more of a curriculum resource.
[00:45:36] Eowyn Crisfield: Yes, yeah, yeah.
[00:45:37] Ed Finch: So we're going to link to both of those in the show notes. So friends can go straight there and have a little look and see if that's useful. What a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for coming in. I've really enjoyed speaking to you, Dr. Grisfield. Thank you so much for sharing your primary features.
[00:45:53] Eowyn Crisfield: Thank you very much.