Welcome to the EAL page of our school website.  Here you will find key documents and information on how we support our EAL learners across the school as well as useful links and resources to support our parents and families.

At Oldfield School, we believe that our EAL (English as an Additional Language) children should be supported to reach their full potential.  We value the richness and diversity that our children and families bring to our community and support our multilingual children in a range of ways.

We use quality first teaching to support those children, by differentiating and scaffolding learning and by providing additional resources and using interventions, so everyone can access our curriculum fully.  This is provided in many ways. For example, by pre-teaching a key text, in order to develop familiarity with a story and explain any new vocabulary, by using visuals like vocabulary mats and glossaries.  We also support all our learners through engaging, practical tasks and using language and discussions to aid understanding.

We also believe in supporting our EAL learners by harnessing the skills of a specialist EAL teacher.  As part of our local offer, we buy into the Specialist Advisory Teacher Service, which supports our higher need EAL pupils on a weekly basis.  The specialist EAL teacher comes into school for 3 hours a week, 30 weeks a year, to focus on those children who we feel need the greatest support.  The children work in small groups of between 2–6, to develop their oral, spoken, comprehension and written language through playing games, developing and reinforcing their topic vocabulary through conversations and engaging tasks.  The EAL coordinator shares the curriculum maps with the EAL teacher so that children's topics can be supported through these specialist sessions. 

Please see below links to useful websites, our policies, the Bell Foundation Assessment Framework and the Department of Education Proficiency in English scale, which we use to assess the level of understanding that our EAL children are working at.