New to English
The new to English Team comprises of two staff: Mr Radek and Miss Farah.
Mr Radek is a qualified teacher from Poland a and has been a resident in the UK for over ten years.
Miss Farah is a highly experienced, bilingual member of support staff who has worked at All Saints’ for many years.
At All Saints’ Primary School, we have children who speak over 42 different Languages, and we are not able to converse with many of these children in their first language. Instead, we spend time helping the children to acclimatise and observe how the school day unfolds.
Some of the languages spoken by pupils at our school include Arabic Bengali (3 types) Bulgarian, Chichewa, Czech, English, Hindko, Hungarian, Kurdish (3 types), Latvian, Polish, Persian (Farsi), Russian, Swahili, Urdu, Yoruba, and Zulu.
We know that if children feel welcome safe and emotionally secure, then they will be ready and able to learn English and progress educationally. Some children take longer to settle than others. Many of the children have left grandparents or older siblings in their country of origin and experience feelings of displacement and disorientation when starting at All Saints.
The New to English team along with the rest of the school staff are able to embody the school mission statement on a day to day basis in that they accept that “Each child is unique and loved by God”. We start form where the child is upon arrival and we “…value what they bring to school from home…”
At All Saints, we provide extra support for those pupils who are newly arrived in England. Children are given up to two years additional support which at All Saints consists of two hours per day for the newest arrivals.
Children who have been in school for over a year are taught in small groups for up to an hour a day.
Children in Year 5 who have had two years or less are supported by Miss Farah in Maths in order to close the gap and bring closer to the Are Related Expectation (ARE) for year 5 pupils.
In an afternoon Mr Radek and Miss Farah both hold intervention groups for children who need extra support in both spoken and written language.
New to English children are assessed for their proficiency in English, using the Government approved grading system, as seen in the table below. It can take a child 10 years to progress from grade A to grade E. We implement a number of strategies to support and help these children rapidly accelerate their progress through interventions, group work and real life experiences.
| STAGE | ABILITY |
|---|---|
| A New to English | May use first language for learning and other purposes. May remain completely silent in the classroom. May be copying/repeating some words or phrases. May understand some everyday expressions in English but may have minimal or no literacy in English. Needs considerable support to operate in English. |
| B Early Acquisition | May follow day to day social communication in English and participate in learning activities with support. Beginning to use spoken English for social purposes. May understand simple instructions and can follow narrative/accounts with individual support. May have become familiar with some subject specific vocabulary. Still needs a significant amount of support. |
| C Developing Competence | May participate in learning activities with increasing independence. Able to express self orally in English, but structural inaccuracies are still apparent. Literacy will require ongoing support, particularly for understanding text and writing. May be able to follow abstract concepts and more complex written English. Requires support to access the curriculum. |
| D Competent | Oral English will be developing well, enabling successful engagement in activities across the curriculum. Can read and understand a wide variety of texts. Written English may lack complexity and contain occasional evidence of errors in structure. Needs some support to access subtle nuances of meaning to refine English usage, and to develop abstract vocabulary. |
| E Fluency | Can operate across the curriculum to a level of competence equivalent to that of a pupil who uses English as his/her first language. |