Multilingualism

At Hereward Primary School, all our children are important, and this applies to each aspects of their education – their teaching and learning, their achievements, their attitudes and their well-being. We encourage all our children to aim for the highest possible standards, and we take account of each child’s individual needs and experiences.

Within our school community, almost all of our children speak English proficiently alongside their home language. However, we also have some young children and new arrivals that may require additional support in English. We view first languages as an asset and we encourage children to remain proud of their languages whilst they are developing their proficiency skills in English. We are extremely proud of the diversity of our pupils and celebrate multilingualism throughout our school.

To track the progress and development of our pupils' English proficiency skills, we use The Bell Foundation assessment system. This enables us to closely monitor progress and ensure support strategies are in place for those that need it. For example, we provide small group intervention sessions to ensure effective opportunities for speaking and listening, reading and writing. We also have a number of other support strategies used to enable pupils to access the curriculum content as much as possible, such as, use of Linguistic pens to help with translations.

We are extremely proud of the achievements of our EAL learners. For example, results from the end of key stage 2 (2021-22) showed that 90% of our EAL pupils achieved age-related expectations in reading, writing and mathematics. This is significantly higher than their EAL national peers in-which 64% achieved the expected standard. This is an incredible achievement and is testament to the collaborative hard work of the children, staff and parents.

If you want further information on how we cater towards our EAL learners, please see our EAL policy in the policies section on the school website. You can also speak to our Inclusion Manager, who would be happy to help.