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.