Time and time again, the same old lamentable excuse is cited for historical low attainment at Moseley School, namely English as an Additional Language (EAL).
Other inner city schools in more deprived
areas of Birmingham are doing twice as well as Moseley School and Moseley School is a
specialist Language College, for crying out loud! The Local Authority also uses the same lamentable excuse of EAL to explain away its own under-performance in certain measures.
If children genuinely have EAL, why are they expected to learn a foreign language? Should they not master English first? Without a good command of the English language, pupils will become disengaged and struggle; and will not be able to access the rest of the curriculum. If Moseley School is a specialist language college and receives approximately £170,000 per annum for the privileged status, why does it have difficulty in addressing EAL?
The following is an extract from a report that was prepared by a member of staff responsible for EAL - following an OFSTED Inspection in 2008 - which was presented to the Curriculum Committee made up of Governors who had challenged this lame, lazy and hazy notion of EAL.
February 2008 OFSTED Inspection:
The recent inspection report made a few brief references to English as an Additional Language (EAL).
Page 3 said: The proportion of students
with English as an additional language is well above the national average.
Page 6 said: Students who are at the early stages of learning English as an additional language…make satisfactory progress.
However, in private discussions with the Head, the Reporting Inspector raised important questions about the manner in which Moseley School use the term EAL and these have stimulated in-school debate and consultation. In essence the Report Inspector’s comment was that we were over reporting the incidence of EAL with the accompanying risk that we might therefore be misrepresenting the language needs of our students and thereby possibly also reducing our achievement.
The school had quantified the proportion of EAL students at greater than 80% and this figure is now understood to be ‘notional’, based upon the gathering of data that was last completed a number of years ago.
DCSF define students as EAL when they come from a household where English is not spoken at the time of entry into the education system. For secondary schools, this means that, in the absence of data passed to us from the primary school, we are dependent on the recall of students (and/or parents) some seven years earlier.
March-July
2008 Consultation with Marion Sharieef, Birmingham Senior Advisor on EAL:
We invited Marion Sharieff to talk to a group of staff about her views on the school’s needs with regard to EAL. She outlined some of the thinking in this area and made the key point that children unfamiliar with English at the age of 4 were unlikely to have acquired Cognitive and Academic Language Proficiency by the time they entered secondary school. This point has possible and profound for every classroom in Moseley School.
April
2008 -present (and beyond) Outcomes of the debate / discussion:
- We propose, from September, that we should (return to)
gather(ing) more reliable data concerning our year 7 intake in order to
establish their ‘EAL status’ – newly arrived / early stage, EAL learners
long-resident or born in UK, advanced bilingual learners.
- Use the above data to better differentiate the categories of
EAL and SEN
- Target the Induction Y7 new arrivals in collaboration with
Senior BASS advisor (join a new BASS programme).
- Conduct a pilot survey of one or more class groups in order to
research data-collecting issues.
- Re-visit provision for the newly-arrived group (and consider
the case for providing after-school first-language teaching).
- Review the policy of support for new arrivals through
‘extraction-only’
- Support for the whole-school promotion of Language in Learning Across the Curriculum (LILAC) (see course outline).
