Best Practice

Ideas for working effectively with multilingual families

EAL Parental engagement
Primary schools have a crucial role to play in welcoming and engaging with the families of multilingual pupils and helping them to support their children’s education and development. Glynis Lloyd advises
Image: Adobe Stock

Multilingual families are a diverse group whose geographical, social, and economic backgrounds vary significantly.

Families speak different languages (and different varieties within languages), have different levels and types of education, may have experienced dislocation from their home because of conflict, and have a range of expectations and understanding about their involvement in their children’s learning, not to mention their rights as a parent regarding their child’s education.

How do primary school leaders ensure their school’s policies and practices are responsive to that diversity, and are welcoming, inclusive, and affirming, so that all families can give their children the best possible support to flourish at school? How can schools become safe spaces that mitigate the effects of racism and exclusion that may exist in the broader community?

In this article, I will set out practical steps for senior leaders as you welcome new multilingual families to your schools.

 

Review policies and practices

Review your school’s policies and practices to assess how they are building language bridges and welcoming, including, and supporting a diverse range of families.

  1. Review your inclusion policies to make sure that anti-racist policies and resultant practices are firmly embedded across your school. 
  2. Consider how inclusion policies are realised in practice – do all staff view multilingual children, their families, their languages and cultural practices as valuable additions to your school community?
  3. Audit governance structures to ensure that the communities that make up your school body are represented as governors and members of parent teacher associations.
  4. Review and strengthen how the board engages with families to include their voice as stakeholders.
  5. Involve the whole-school community in constructing a language policy or reviewing your existing one. The guidance How to write an EAL school policy from The Bell Foundation is helpful (see further information).
  6. Assess your staff’s specialist knowledge of the way bilingualism works, the value of bilingualism for learning, and the role of home languages for affirming identity and building cognitive ability. Quality training will help teachers engage with families as they support their children to draw on all their linguistic resources as they learn.
  7. Consider your hiring practices – building a diverse teaching and support staff can provide resources for supporting new families and improving home-school communication.
  8. Identify parents who have been at your school for some time and who can be parent ambassadors and act as a bridge and source of information for new families, especially where they share home and language backgrounds.
  9. Consider arrangements that will be particularly helpful for those new families who have survived trauma. For example, can their children leave their PE kits at school to lessen the burden of managing school demands and to ensure their children always have what they need.
  10. Assess your budget – can you employ a family support worker who can help and advise new families on housing issues, for example, especially where support services don’t exist in your area?

 

Gather and share information

The initial meetings with families, prior to and around admission, are crucial opportunities for schools to gather and share information.

Heads can consider how meetings are conducted, what information is shared with families about the school, and what information is gathered from families – and how it is all recorded and communicated with all staff who need to know.

  1. Assess how your school can ensure that relationships with families are built on trust and respect. Look at your website and signage around the school. Is your messaging about welcoming all languages and cultures loud and clear?
  2. Make sure that where necessary, interpreters have been arranged, who use the language variety of the family, so that information-sharing is reliable and accurate. Where interpreters are not affordable or available, find out if any staff members share the family’s language and can interpret.
  3. Prepare a welcome pack that includes translated versions of key documents, including information about the English education system. The Bell Foundation has pamphlets explaining the English education system (see further information). These have been translated into 22 of the most commonly spoken languages in English schools and can help parents who come from education systems that function differently.
  4. Share information about your school and the way it works, translated if possible – for example, what are the expectations around attendance and discipline?
  5. Explain how your school values each family’s involvement in their child’s education, how communication between home and school works, and who the key staff are that families can talk to. Families may come from contexts in which parents have no say in decisions about their children’s schooling.
  6. Use visuals in written communication with families to help those new to English to access meaning.
  7. Gather information about each child’s previous schooling, the languages they use, the curriculum knowledge they may have, and whether they have literacy learning in their home language. This information will help teachers to plan language support and design activities in which children can show what they know, by using visuals for example. Note that some parents may have educated their children at home because they were unable to send their children to school in their country and their children may have extensive literacy and curriculum knowledge.
  8. Recognise that a proportion of multilingual children may have SEND in addition to their language needs and that families may come from cultural contexts in which SEND is stigmatised and may feel ashamed about their child’s needs. Communicate clearly that all children have a right to a school place and the support they need and explain what your school can offer in the form of SEND provision. See our guidance EAL and SEND: Guidance for integrated provision in schools (see further information).
  9. Be aware that those families who have been forced to flee their homes are very likely to be experiencing trauma, which will affect their ability to support their children. They and their children may not be comfortable sharing information about their experiences and will need careful and sensitive engagement from staff, with the help of pastoral care staff.
  10. Establish what barriers to participation in meetings and other aspects of school life families might face, for example because their working hours conflict with meeting times or difficulty reaching the school because of distance/lack of transport in rural areas. They will need opportunities for meeting with teachers, for example in via regular home visits for younger learners with greater needs, and for participating in school life when they can.

 

Establish home-school communication

Communication between home and school needs to be a two-way process so that schools can provide families with information in an open and transparent way, gather their views on matters that affect their children and create opportunities for families to contribute to policy development, especially as it affects language.

  1. Make sure that families have all the information they need about school requirements, activities, outings, and events, in a language and format that is accessible to them. For example, emails may not be helpful if the family doesn’t have access to a computer.
  2. Find out about parents’ interests and skills so that they can contribute in a meaningful way in the classroom, at events, or by providing translation for other families.
  3. Communicate clearly to families about all decisions regarding their child, including whether they will sit national curriculum tests, the outcome of all assessment and the implications, and decisions about any concerns regarding special needs. Engage parents and include their views in any plans for specialist support.

 

Support families to promote home language development

In an increasingly global environment, being multilingual has major advantages, and the need for children to continue to develop their home languages while they learn English is increasingly recognised (ASCL, 2024).

Families will have different views about the role of their home language in their child’s education. Some may feel it has no place in an English school system and that continuing to use their home language may be confusing, while some may feel strongly about the importance of their home language in their child’s life, for maintaining strong family connections and building cultural knowledge about their heritage.

Schools have an important role to play in dispelling myths about language learning and in educating families about the important role of their home language in their children’s cognitive development. Making this real includes:

  1. Encouraging children to make use of all the languages they know as they learn, as the school’s normal way of working.
  2. Advising families to go beyond using their home language for everyday language, by telling, reading and talking about stories together, playing word games, engaging with their children about what they have learnt at school, and (where possible) supporting children as they conduct research for projects in their home language.
  3. Building a love of reading by using bilingual story-books in class and sending them home for children to enjoy with their families and using wordless books, where children can create their own stories to match the illustrations in their preferred language.
  4. Inviting parents to conduct story-telling and reading in their language to groups of children.
  5. Encouraging families to enroll their children in community language schools.
  6. Planning parent information events on this topic and sharing information. There is a great example of an effective parental information leaflet from Essex County Council, entitled The importance of home language (see further information).
  7. Share The Bell Foundation guidance for families – entitled Guidance for parents of students who use EAL – which is also available in 22 languages.

 

Engage families in school life

As Manzoni and Rolfe (2019) have shown, schools across the country have involved families in a range of ways as they support them to adjust to life in a new country. Here are some examples:

  1. Running and hosting ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) classes for parents.
  2. Hosting multicultural events and workshops.
  3. Inviting parents to attend aspects of school life that don’t require them to speak but give them a sense of how things work in their children’s school. They could attend assemblies, especially where their child is receiving an award, and observe a class, for example.
  4. Arranging health classes, including to provide information about the NHS, alongside information about the school’s policies on health matters and related issues such as absence.
  5. Hosting coffee mornings for families to get together, share information and network socially.

 

Consult community organisations 

Find out about community organisations in your area, such as those supporting refugee families, services to support people suffering from trauma, organisations running language schools, and those that provide translation and interpreting services. 
And why not investigate whether your school could become a School of Sanctuary – a network of schools that support children who have been forced to flee their homes (see further information).

 

Final thoughts

Schools need to be sensitive and responsive to the wide range of beliefs and expectations that families may have. Building lasting relationships with families takes time and on-going effort from all the staff in the school. Heads can make sure that through their school’s policies and governance, and by creating a diverse, trained staff body, multilingual families can become equal, active, and contributing members of the school community. 

 

Resources from The Bell Foundation

Further reading & references