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New Arrivals Excellence Programme: Primary and Secondary National Strategies

New arrivals – a brief introduction

New arrivals are:

• international migrants, including refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants from overseas;
• internal migrants, including children and young people joining schools as a result of moving home within the UK;
• institutional movers: children and young people who change schools without moving home;
• individual movers: learners who move without their family, for example looked-after children.

• Every learner in our schools has an entitlement to fulfilling their potential through access to the National Curriculum.
• This can only be achieved within a whole-school context where learners are educated with their peers.
• Children and young people learn best when they feel secure and valued. Schools need to ensure that there is a process to support the integration for new arrivals.
• Leadership should promote race equality so should be clear about the requirements of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act and needs to focus on the positive contributions made by new arrivals and mobile learners.
• Provision for children and young people needs to be based on a meaningful assessment of individuals’ prior knowledge and experience.
• Support needs to be made available for parents and carers of new arrivals to familiarise themselves with the new education system that their child is now part of.

• provision of continuing professional development (CPD) – especially the requirements of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act – for school improvement partners (SIPs), senior leadership teams (SLTs), staff, governors and support staff;
• deployment of ethnic minority achievement (EMA) staff and alignment of their work with Primary National Strategy (PNS), Secondary National Strategy (SNS) and school improvement teams. This includes the scope of EMA support – many schools expect direct LA intervention, which is not always feasible. EMA staff should be working strategically to build capacity in schools;
• identification of, and sharing of, good practice to support schools with developing good practice;
• helping schools to identify where they can share resources, for example bilingual teaching assistants;
• admissions – are there protocols for the admission of new arrivals (especially at Key Stages 3 and 4)? Does the Admissions Forum have an overview of the issue? Does the LA know how many new arrivals are waiting for a school place and how long they have been waiting? Are the LA mechanisms for accessing a school place client-friendly (especially for clients who speak little or no English)? Is there an uneven distribution of new arrivals across schools?

• welcome procedure: are the families of new arrivals greeted, not kept waiting unnecessarily and is there access to an interpreter?
• preparation and planning: admissions, assessment, pedagogical awareness, planning an appropriate curriculum;
• support systems: class buddies, mentors, involvement of parents and carers and deployment of support staff;
• intervention: cognitive challenge of lessons, identification of next steps, scaffolding acquisition of English;
• ongoing support: target setting and tracking, awareness of the difference between social and academic fluency and the changing needs of learners as they become more fluent in English;
• use of first language: encouragement to use first language as a tool for learning;
• examinations and tests: awareness of special arrangements that can be made for new arrivals; access to GCSE and A-level exams in their first language.