Description

When drawing up plans for the theme of NALDIC Conference 19, there were a number of options we considered but we very quickly settled on ‘EAL and Additional Needs’ as both an important and urgent area for our field given the likely disastrous effect of the Coalition Government’s cuts as they worked their way through an increasingly comatose DFE and on to struggling Local Authorities and schools.

As recent exchanges on the EAL-Bilingual Google Group have shown, this Government’s strategy for EAL appears to be a new set of 3Rs: redundancy, retirement and resignation. We now face a situation where those colleagues left after so-called ‘re-organisation’ have been left wondering how on earth they are going to meet the needs of increasing numbers of students with increasingly diverse needs from a pool of decreasing staff with decreasing specialisms.

Contents

Editorial (page 2)
Frank Monaghan

View from the Chair (page 3)
Amy Thompson

Inclusive education, additional needs and EAL: values, concepts and issues (page 5)
Professor Brahm Norwich

The Building Early Sentences (BESt) Project – Designing Bilingual Speech and Language Therapy Interventions (page 17)
Dr Sean Pert

The Diverse Communication Needs of Young Children in the Foundation Stage. Reflecting on Policy to Practice Issues (page 28)
Carolyn Blackburn and Carol Aubrey

Co-occurring Specific Learning Differences (page 33)
Anne Margaret Smith

The Academic Achievement of Y6 Pupils with EAL: Child-related and Situational Factors (page 36)
Lina Shaheen

Improving Educational Outcomes for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller pupils (page 41)
Brian Foster

EAL learners and dyslexia (page 53)
Tony Cline

Deafness in EAL children (page 57)
Dr Merle Mahon

NALDIC News (page 59)