Long-time NALDIC friend and EAL community member, Frank Monaghan, reflects on the 2023 NALDIC Conference

I’ve attended pretty much every NALDIC conference since 1993. Back then I was an EAL teacher working in a large multilingual secondary school in central London and was part of a team of  – read it and weep – 19 (yes, nineteen!) full-time-equivalent EAL specialist teachers. In those days, I thought the past was another country. But now, when I talk to teachers and people working in teacher education, I wish the present were.

Gone are the specialist PGCEs in EAL that I and many of my colleagues had, gone are almost all local authority EAL support services, gone is the ring-fenced funding in school budgets, gone are the dedicated EAL HM inspectors that ensured EAL was part of school inspections, and gone are all but homeopathic references to EAL in the Department for Education documentation and thinking (maybe that one’s a secret blessing!)

So much has been lost. So why keep coming back for more?

Well, as conference always reminds me, what hasn’t gone is the need: EAL learners are still very much here and in ever-increasing numbers (about 22% of primary pupils and 18% of secondary pupils, totaling almost 1.7 million bilingual learners) and the annual NALDIC conference is one of the very few spaces where people working day-in and day-out in schools and higher education can meet together to discuss best practice, share insights, gain new ones, find inspiration, browse exhibitor resources, have a full hour for lunch, and recharge both their intellectual and emotional batteries to get them through the draining fag-end of the year.

And sometimes, you discover the present is indeed a foreign country, but one you’d rather like to live in. One of the highlights of this year’s conference for me was Clare Harker, headteacher of a primary school in Glasgow, who gave a truly uplifting talk about the work done in her school with EAL/refugee children and their families. Her passionate, funny, honest and humane description of what and why she and her community get up to every day was a treat and both a reminder and exhortation that the way things are is not the way they have to be.

Clare left us with the words of the novelist Dina Nayeri: “It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks”. Her talk reminded me that whilst it takes a village to raise a child, that village needs a school and its whole staff to educate them.

But a conference isn’t just about the big learning points we get from the keynotes and workshops – great and important though they are and were again this year – it’s also about those side moments: reconnecting with old colleagues and friends over a coffee; breaking bread with strangers over lunch; finding a new book or activity at the exhibitor stalls; and above all, just having that chance to step out of the endless flow of oncoming traffic that is education -the corridors of powerlessness – and discover that you are among like-minded people, discovering solutions, not being ground down but cheered up, and leaving feeling ready to ‘open the door’ to whatever ‘knocks’ are coming your way next.

Has registration for the 2024 conference opened yet?