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Supporting students with EAL in GCSE English

Almost one secondary student in five in England has a first language other than English. The label covers fluent bilingual students and recent arrivals alike, so the first job is finding out who needs what.

Quick guide for teachers · 4 minute read

In the Department for Education’s school census for January 2026, 19.3% of students in secondary schools were recorded as having “a first language known or believed to be other than English”, up from 19.2% the year before. Across all schools the figure was 21.6%. In a class of 30, that is about six students on average.

What the label tells you

The census records a language, and says nothing about how well a student speaks, reads or writes English. A student born in England who speaks Polish at home and writes fluent English is counted, for example, and so is a student who arrived last term with very little English. They need different things.

An analysis of the National Pupil Database for the EEF, by Steve Strand, Lars Malmberg and James Hall (2015), concluded: “It is proficiency in the English language that is the major factor influencing the degree of support an individual student will require.” So the EAL flag is a prompt to find out more about each student’s English.

To find out where a student is, the Bell Foundation’s EAL Assessment Framework assesses listening, speaking, reading and writing against five proficiency levels, and is “available free of charge to all schools in the UK”. Ask your EAL coordinator or SENCo what the school already uses before you start your own.

Proficiency and attainment are different measures. A student new to English may understand exactly why Macbeth cannot sleep and still be unable to write a paragraph about it in English. A low mark on a timed essay can hide a sharp reader.

What helps in English lessons

The Bell Foundation’s guidance on teaching EAL learners in English and English Literature names the particular difficulty of our subject: “English literature is laden with figurative and idiomatic language that adds ambiguity and may be confusing, even for learners who are fluent in English.” Set texts add older language too. The guidance notes that literary texts “may contain archaic language”, and Macbeth and A Christmas Carol have plenty.

Pre-teach the words and the story. The Bell Foundation advises that teachers “identify the vocabulary and storylines that learners using EAL will have difficulty understanding, and design pre-reading activities”. In our lessons that is three to five words taught before every reading, each with a short definition. Getting the whole story in place early helps too, so that each extract lands in a plot the student already knows.

Make the story visible. The same guidance suggests visual approaches “for example of plot outlines”. A one-page story map of the text, with each character’s name and one picture, gives a student something to point at when the English runs out.

Let students talk before they write. The EEF’s secondary literacy guidance recommends structured talk, sequenced with reading and writing so students can “develop ideas before writing”, and adds that “Quality of talk is likely to be more important than quantity”. A pair rehearsing their What–How–Why paragraph aloud before writing it is structured talk.

Give frames, then take them away. The Bell Foundation recommends designing tasks “with scaffolding, like sentence frames”. Our Securing level has a word bank, a worked example and sentence starters for What, How and Why, and a student moves on to prompts as soon as the starters feel easy. The level describes today’s support, so it changes as the student’s English grows.

Use the first language. Among its suggestions, the Bell Foundation lists letting students “work in a group that shares the same language to discuss a topic using their preferred language”. A student who can argue about Scrooge in Polish or Arabic has the idea, and the English can follow.

In the exam

The exams are in English, and the Literature papers are closed book, so quotations have to be learned. Short ones are easier to remember and to spell: see How many quotations should students learn?. Spelling and punctuation count in Language (AO6) and in parts of Literature (AO4), so build two minutes of checking into every timed answer.

A first language other than English is not, on its own, a learning difficulty under the exam rules. JCQ’s access arrangements rules state: “A candidate does not have a learning difficulty simply because their first language is not English, Irish or Welsh.” See Access arrangements in English exams for what the rules do allow.

Sources

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