At St. Peter’s, we welcome, value and celebrate all our children.

At St. Peter’s, around 50% of our pupils have English as an additional language. This enriches our diverse family at St. Peter’s.

If your child joins us at St. Peter’s, you will be asked to provide us with information including your country of origin and languages spoken at home. We can use and refer to this information during topic work and when celebrating special days.

Induction and Ambassadors

When pupils with English as an additional language arrive at St. Peter’s they will be assessed using the Bell Foundation’s EAL Assessment Framework. This provides a bench mark of a child’s English language. It enables us to provide appropriate levelled support.

For children who have a basic knowledge of spoken English, we will also use Talking Partners. Talking Partners is designed to improve the way children communicate across the curriculum, enabling them to become independent and skilful speakers and listeners. It is a targeted, time-limited (10 week) intervention programme that can be used with small groups or the whole class.

As part of your child’s induction, we have children in Y5 and Y6 who have volunteered as ambassadors for their country of origin and their first language. Ambassadors can be matched to your child. They will be introduced and able to offer support and potentially help with interpretation if this is required.

EAL Advisor

St. Peter’s welcomes our termly visits from Bhupinder Gill who is an experienced EAL advisor offering the staff a wealth of practical ideas and support, in developing English as an additional language for many of our children.

A couple of websites that Bhupinder recommends are:

https://www.mamalisa.com/

Clips of songs and rhymes in a variety of languages

https://uk.mantralingua.com/

Bilingual children’s books and resources to purchase

We have just allocated a member of our staff team to lead on EAL sessions, using the Talk Partner’s scheme, with an emphasis on developing grammatically, correctly spoken English and vocabulary.

Language of the Term

To enable us all to appreciate, understand and embrace all of our pupil’s cultures and languages, we have a Language of the Term.

This includes:

• A Parent mail is sent out to all parents to tell them what the Language of the Term is and inviting any volunteers to visit our school and share their culture and language through talks, showing artefacts, songs etc.
• An introductory presentation assembly about the language, country and culture. Children who speak this language are invited to be involved if they wish.
• In class, children who speak this language are invited to teach their peers numbers or colours etc.
• An interactive display in our corridor for all to see and access.
• Songs are learned in this language at singing club.
• Registers are responded to in the Language of the Term both in the morning and afternoon.
• Children say ‘Thank you’ in the Language of the Term when given gifts from the Birthday Box.

St. Peter’s welcome any additional ideas that parents and children wish to contribute. Maybe your child can bring in and show an artefact or book from their heritage country. Perhaps you have a children’s that you can tell .