Toil and trouble: the life of an inner-city support teacher, then and now

How it used to be:  May 2015

It’s Double English for the bottom set of our fifteen-year-olds, and Google Translate is my friend.  I wasn’t timetabled to be in their lesson yesterday, and I arrive today to discover that they’ve just started Macbeth.  Along with the rest of the class, the blond and lethargic Ukrainian giant, and the shy skinny girl from the Dominican Republic (via Spain) who have been in the school only a few months and still have minimal English, have been equipped with three pages of a comic strip summary of the plot, based on characters from The Simpsons; so has the headscarved girl who’s just arrived from Syria, and speaks no English at all.  The sheets aren’t numbered, and the students have stuck them into their exercise books out of sequence, so that they make even less sense.  The Syrian girl has been placed next to another Arabic speaker, a lumbering Lebanese girl who has lived in Britain all her life; I have my doubts about her effectiveness as a mentor, as she is rather dim, and exceptionally indolent.

The commendably willing and determined young newly qualified teacher talks her class through a Powerpoint with a different Simpsons summary of Macbeth, occasionally diverting into photos of various stage or film productions of the play.  It strikes me how tricksy and idiosyncratic most professional productions of Shakespeare are these days, when what we desperately want is something straightforward, that just provides a crib for the text.  Our three Somalis start getting restive, variously rapping or swearing or emitting very loud, random screeches; there are plenty of conscientious, academically able Somalis in this school, but none of them are in this class.  One cheery little Afghan boy, who’s very dyslexic, goes to sleep, while a Pakistani girl with special needs, who is barely literate in English or Urdu, busily copies everything down regardless.

I chiefly deal with the three who speak the least English.  I do witch impressions, and thunder and lightning impressions, while Google Translating the words on my laptop into a potpourri of languages.   The impressions are appreciated; even the Syrian girl, who is sweet but serious, smiles.  I instruct the Ukrainian boy and the Spanish girl to get out their phones (which they are not allowed in school), and help them to find the Wikipedia entry for Macbeth in their languages; I find the same thing in Arabic on my laptop for the Syrian girl, and leave them all ploughing their way through the lengthy plot summaries.

Everyone else has been given a short, jumbled plot summary in nine boxes which they have to cut out and stick into the right order.  I run around and rescue those people who are sticking them in completely at random, and number the boxes for them correctly, in case they should ever be able or willing to read the words; when I go back to my group, I help them do theirs, and try to deal with the Ukrainian, who asks me, very haltingly, if William Shakespeare killed Banquo; I get him to look up Shakespeare on his phone.

In ten days’ time, the whole year group, including this class, have to submit the first draft of a 1,000-word piece of GCSE coursework entitled: To what extent is Lady Macbeth presented as a strong character in the play?

There are a number of lunacies in operation here, but the chief of them is this: it is recommended policy in this school, as in many others, that students who arrive with little or no English should attend all the normal lessons, rather than start with an intensive foundation course in beginners’ English, as happens in more rational places.  It’s a policy which this school follows slavishly: any specific EAL (English as an Additional Language) coaching has to be held before or after school, or at lunch-time, and is usually just once or twice a week.  As a result, students can be in the school for years, and still write in pidgin – pidgin inexpertly ornamented with sporadic fancy terminology, such as ‘oxymoron’, ‘connotation’, or ‘pathetic fallacy’.

At midnight, as Google Translate and I prepare three different bilingual summaries of Macbeth for my target three students, I hope against hope that someone with the necessary clout will do something about this madness. And it’s no consolation to reflect sardonically that Macbeth is a story that should resonate well with Syrians, Ukrainians, Afghans and Somalis, all of them only too familiar with “dismal conflict” …

How it is now: September 2016

How things can change in a year!  All these problems are over for the support teacher, because there are no more support teachers in the school, nor are there teaching assistants.  Classroom teachers have total responsibility for the students with little or no English, as well as for those with special needs.  The funding situation decrees that it shall be so.  Refugee children have been trickling in under the Dubs Amendment, under the Vulnerable Persons’ Resettlement Programme, and under the Dublin III Regulation, but how are they going to assimilate or get a job if they have no proper foundation in English?

Refugee children need to be properly prepared for life in the U.K.

Whatever you think about the arrival of refugee children and teenagers in the UK, surely it makes sense for them, once they’re here, to be properly prepared for a happy and successful life in this country? 

Since the refugee camp at Calais was closed in October 2016, the UK has taken in around 750 unaccompanied children from there, allowing them to join their relatives in the UK, although several hundred more remain in France, despite having a legal right to come to the UK.   Only a few councils have offered to take them in, although the UK has signed up three times over to accept certain refugee children and young people: most recently, in May 2016, the UK Parliament agreed to the “Dubs amendment” to the Immigration Act, which meant Britain would offer sanctuary to some of the most vulnerable unaccompanied child refugees in Europe.  (Poignantly, the person who proposed this amendment, Lord (Alf) Dubs, arrived here from Czechoslovakia in 1938 as a little boy of six on the Kindertransport.)  Secondly, the UK has also signed up to the EU Dublin III Regulation (originally from 1990), undertaking to accept refugee children who already have relatives living in this country.  Thirdly, the UK government established, in 2014, the Syrian Vulnerable Person Resettlement Programme, under which around 1,600 people had been resettled in the UK by March 2016.

So, one way or another, refugee children and teenagers have arrived in the UK – from war-torn or repressive states, from Syria, from Afghanistan, from Eritrea, from Sudan … However, once these youngsters are in the UK, they are up against a huge extra barrier. For years now, newly arrived children have been subject to a dreadful double whammy at school.  Firstly, a ridiculous ideology has held sway in many areas that the best way to integrate children with little or no English is not a thorough foundation course in the language, nor even frequent intensive English withdrawal lessons, but instead that they should simply attend all normal classes and absorb English by osmosis.  I have thus seen a Syrian refugee who knew no English beyond the alphabet, confronted by GCSE coursework on Macbeth, and an Afghan not literate in any language grappling with An Inspector Calls.  And then there’s all the rest of the curriculum to contend with, including (in the first three years of secondary school) compulsory French or Spanish. 

Secondly, there has been steadily less and less money available for EAL  (English as an Additional Language) departments, so that many school EAL co-ordinators now struggle with no staff and no time to work with these children, and class teachers are expected to provide all necessary support for them in ever-larger classes, with no help at all.  In secondary schools, EAL students are likely to find themselves dumped in bottom sets along with children with special educational needs or emotional and behavioural difficulties – not exactly the best environment for traumatised young people who’ve just arrived in a strange country.

The current “arrangements” for EAL in many schools are frustrating, depressing and exhausting for the teachers – but for the EAL students themselves, they are downright dangerous.  If they are not taught English efficiently, thoroughly and quickly, they have no hope of accessing the rest of the curriculum, of gaining qualifications, of finding employment – in short, of settling happily and productively into life in this country.