Silver EAL Quality Mark Award for Marshalls Park Academy
Normally we only write EAL Quality Mark blogs about schools with a gold award. Sometimes, however, a school with a silver award has done a particular thing so well that we feel we must share it. Marshalls Park Academy in Romford is such a school. The graph below shows the scale of the challenge it has faced over the last ten years.
What comes next, inevitably, is a continuation of this trend. In another five years we might well see a White British population that is barely 40% of pupils while almost a third of pupils will have English as an additional language. The school’s EAL lead has been there since 2014 and successfully helped colleagues to adjust what they do to meet the needs of a rapidly changing intake and understand that there is more change to come.
Many staff have learnt phrases in key languages that make new arrivals feel welcome and at ease. Seating plans are sensitive to pupils’ needs. Pupils are appropriately paired in classrooms and feel supported by their peers. Where flexibility with the curriculum is possible, opportunities are taken. The History curriculum, for example, now reflects the greatly increased African presence among the school’s pupils.
Communication with parents of EAL pupils is built on the
assumption that not only might translation be needed, but also that there is a need for an explanation of a school system very different to the one parents are likely to be familiar with.
What Marshalls Park has now is a widespread awareness among staff that whatever is working now will continue to have to change as the school’s linguistic and demographic profiles change over the next few years.
They are up for the change and very confident of managing it effectively.