NALDIC Response to the ‘Educational Outcomes of Children with English as an Additional Language’ report published on 7th February 2018 by the Education Policy Institute with The Bell Foundation and Unbound Philanthropy.
In brief
In this brief response, NALDIC welcomes and wishes to endorse many of the key points and recommendations in the report:
1. Headline Government figures on children with English as an Additional Language misrepresent pupil performance by using data that is distorted by missing or misleading prior attainment records.
2. The Government should consider:
- A ‘late arrival premium’ to boost support for children with EAL arriving in the English school system late in the primary or secondary phase.
- Providing additional eligible years of funding to support EAL pupils to progress from informal spoken language proficiency to academic English proficiency.
- Developing new policies to generate and maintain EAL expertise in schools.
- Establishing a plan for the future of English proficiency assessment.
- Ensuring that more comprehensive official data and analysis of EAL students’ attainment outcomes are used to inform policies.
Indeed, several points made in the report about misrepresentation of EAL pupil performance are consistent with views expressed in NALDIC’s recently published position statement about GCSE and equivalent results in England 2016 to 2017 and articles in the EAL Journal Blog:
NALDIC’s Position | GCSE and equivalent results in England 2016 to 2017
Blog | The attainment of EAL pupils in England. What the headlines don’t tell us
Blog | EAL English proficiency and attainment-What does the national EAL assessment data tell us?
NALDIC will dissect and elaborate on some of the issues raised in the report that merit more careful analysis in a detailed response that will appear in our flagship publication, EAL Journal.
10th February 2018
Detailed response
Once published in EAL Journal, this will be linked to from here.