Around half of my students aged between 16 and 18 arrived in the UK as unaccompanied children seeking asylum, having fled countries in fear for their lives.
Many of them have experienced trauma from the devastation of war and atrocities in their own countries and feel stressed and anxious. They are lonely and isolated and in many cases do not have an established support network of friends or any family here or at all. This isolation has been exacerbated by the coronavirus outbreak. Unable to come into college, they are forced to stay indoors, in the hostels that many of them live in.
They migrated to the UK to be safe and to gain an education, having received little or no education at all in their home countries. Again, the pandemic has thrown this into doubt: generally they are anxious and low in spirits, worried that they will not be able to get the education that they have struggled so hard to reach.
The other half of my students – the non-asylum-seeking 16- to 18-year-old students of English for speakers of other languages (Esol), who arrived with family as economic migrants – are also concerned. They’re worried about getting even further behind in their education, having arrived in the UK before completing their GCSE-equivalent year in their countries.
I was concerned that all this could lead to many of them feeling as though they might as well give up on education altogether.
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Putting support in place
At City and Islington College (Candi), we have provided financial support to help students access computers and online learning during the coronavirus pandemic.
Switching to remote learning has been hard for many Esol students, particularly at entry level, but as teachers, we have made sure that students have any support they need with digital skills and work is available in various formats outside lesson time.
Some teachers have had to homeschool their own children during the crisis, so timetables have had to be adapted to provide lessons around personal circumstances. Lesson planning has also taken longer than usual as there has been limited access to many resources.
Pair and group work are pivotal to language learning, and these have been replicated by running smaller groups simultaneously on Microsoft Teams and jumping between them to monitor students’ progress. I have found the group chat in Teams to be a very effective way of getting learners to react and respond even more during online lessons.
I have also encouraged more self-study, including websites such as BBC Learning English and the British Council’s Esol Nexus, as well as helping students with course progression and preparing for job interviews.
Keeping aspirations high
Teachers have explained the Covid-19 legislation in a way they can understand, updating them about any changes and how they can keep themselves safe in lockdown. One of our online class projects I used to keep them motivated came from asking them what they had been up to during this time.
The discussion led to a lesson on the present perfect continuous tense (eg, I have been working, we have been chatting, etc). Students were asked to find out what their classmates had been doing at a fictional reunion in 10 years’ time and then write articles for a 2030 college alumni magazine.
Reading the students’ articles was so incredibly heartwarming, and it was so good to hear them sounding so happy in an alternative reality, which hopefully will turn out to be their actual reality in 10 years’ time.
The whole project felt so pertinent when there is a need to keep aspirations high at this difficult and unprecedented time.
As a team, we've really pulled together by sharing resources and ideas. It’s been a massive effort.
Chloe Jacobs is an English for speakers of other languages (Esol) lecturer at City and Islington College
