Campaigners for language education have voiced concern that changes to data that schools must give to the government will have a negative impact on some pupils with English as an additional language (EAL). Here’s what you need to know.
What is changing?
School census guidance published on Thursday showed that, from now on, the Department for Education does not expect schools to collect data on pupils’ proficiency in English, the country of their birth or their nationality.
It says: “Schools are therefore no longer required to assess a child’s proficiency in English for the purpose of transmitting to the department via the school census.”
In doing so it is removing something which has only been in place for a year, having been introduced to the school census in January 2017.
Why has this raised alarm?
While removing the check on pupils’ nationality might be broadly welcomed, experts in language education fear removing the check on the English proficiency of pupils will have a detrimental effect on EAL pupils.
Peta Ullmann, the chair of Naldic (National Association of Language Development in the Curriculum) says that being able to provide a high-quality and inclusive education for all pupils with EAL relies on schools on having accurate data about their proficiency in English. For her, the main value of the census check was not what it told the government, but what it told schools about their own EAL pupils.
She has urged the Department for Education to review this decision, which she described as a “retrograde step”.
But aren’t EAL pupils outperforming other pupils?
This is true - to a point.
When the government published its GCSE statistics earlier this year, the data showed that, in 2017, for the first time ever students with the perceived disadvantage of having English as an additional language had actually outperformed native speakers on all of the DfE’s key measures.
However, there are questions about the reliability of this data, whether it fails to take into account some pupils’ starting points and whether some performance measures such as Progress 8 favour EAL pupils. Even without those caveats, campaign groups warn that the success of EAL pupils in performance tables masks as much as it reveals.
The Bell Foundation points out that children with EAL have widely varying levels of English proficiency. In fact, some have no English while some are fluent multilingual English-speakers; some may have lived in English-speaking countries and some may be refugees who have had not only never learned English before, but have limited prior experience of education. It is in this context that Naldic and the Bell Foundation want the proficiency check to remain in place.
What should schools do now?
Officially they are no longer required to carry out proficiency check on pupils’ proficiency in English. However, campaigners are calling for them to carry on this work for their pupils’ benefit rather than the government’s.
Ms Ullmann said: “We recommend that if schools are no longer required to assess proficiency in English for the purpose of the census they continue to do so internally in order to provide informed provision for their EAL learners.”
She said the country should not return to the assumption that “the curriculum and assessments for subject English are adequate and appropriate to the needs of EAL pupils from diverse backgrounds.”
