A new report by Dr Ariel Lindorff, Professor Steve Strand OBE and Ivan Au, outlines new evidence about educational attainment in school pupils with English as an Additional Language.
The number of school pupils who speak English as an Additional Language (EAL) has tripled since 1997 and multilingual classrooms are now the norm.
This interim report details evidence about EAL learners and why measuring proficiency in English is essential for schools to understand their attainment trajectory and unlock their potential. Proficiency in English has the strongest relationship with educational attainment, explaining four to six times as much variation as gender, free school meal status and ethnicity combined.
The full report, due in the autumn, will dig deeper into the diversity of EAL learners and the variation in educational achievement.
The research was carried out for the Bell Foundation, a charity that promotes inclusion by language education.
Read an opinion piece on the report in Tes magazine by Diana Sutton, Director of the Bell Foundation .