[eal-bilingual] Recording more than one language

DCSF has been getting rather uppity over what constitutes a pupil with EAL
recently. New arrivals in KS4 from Nigeria and Sierra Leone can no longer be
removed from the GCSE denominator because the DCSF believe they must have
spent all their educational careers in English medium schools and therefore
cannot have English as an additional language. I am sorely tempted to do an
FOI enquiry to the Home Office asking how many bigots they've transferred to
the DCSF in the last year

-----Original Message-----
From: eal-bilingual-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk
[mailto:eal-bilingual-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk] On Behalf Of CATHARINE
DRIVER
Sent: 26 January 2008 18:38
To: stuart.scott; For practitioners involved in teaching pupils from ethnic
andlinguistic minorities
Subject: Re: [eal-bilingual] Recording more than one language

Yes I've come across some of these problems too. 
  However, SIMS can record two languages. I think it has a section for home
language and another for mother tongue. I cannot however, put in 3
languages. 

  We still find SIMS cannot record some of the more obscure languages, but
you can customise it to do so. It's just that when you get a new language
it's never seen before that the data manager has to alter the field or
something.
  Our system didn't like Thai, Mongolian, Oromo and Malayalam this year for
example!

  From what I remember the DCSF think that if one parent speaks English and
the child has been speaking English at home, she cannot then be EAL- but I
just ignore this and record whatever home language is spoken as well as
English and no one has complained yet!

  Generally  the inputting of data is only as good as the admission form, so
the onus on schools is to get that right first. 

  Catharine

"stuart.scott" <stuart.scott at collaborativelearning.org> wrote:
  I was in a school yesterday where a group of new arrivals were being 
put on the school data system.Two of them had parents who had different 
first languages and the children had acquired both. The school used 
Integris and there was only apparent space on the system to record one 
language. I think that if schools use SIMS there is a way in which both 
languages can be recorded.

Some questions.

Are you giving guidance to schools about recording their languages?

Are you encouraging them to record more than one language?

Have you encountered a two/three... language issue?

Are schools recording languages arbitrarily e.g. from the language of 
the father only/the mother only?

If a child has an English father and consequently an English sounding 
family name but speaks another language, is this getting recorded?

Stuart

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