Additional adults will play a key role in supporting newly arrived pupils to access the curriculum and to realise their potential for success and achievement. They can make an important contribution to ensuring that teaching is inclusive through overcoming barriers to learning and ensuring that diverse needs are addressed.

In many schools there may be a range of additional adults who provide support in the classroom to newly arrived pupils. These include:

• teaching and classroom assistants
• learning mentors
• induction mentors
• learning support assistants
• bilingual language assistants
• nursery nurses.

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Working together: some suggestions

For additional adults to be deployed effectively consideration needs to be given to the range of skills each can offer. It is also essential that there are opportunities to meet in order to plan classroom interventions and to clarify roles. Working with new arrivals is a shared responsibility, not a job for additional adults in isolation.

Within the classroom, additional adults can provide the following support:

• integrating newly arrived pupils into classroom routines
• boosting pupils’ confidence and speaking and listening skills by engaging them in conversation
• supporting pupils in maintaining concentration and participation
• explaining and reinforcing learning objectives
• preparing individual pupils for lessons by, for example, reading the relevant chapter of a novel in advance with them
• during starter activities, making a note of which pupils are not coping with the exercise so that the teacher knows which pupils will need an objective teaching again at a later date or will need to go back a stage to consolidate their learning of a particular concept or skill
• valuing pupils’ home languages and encouraging them to use them in their learning
• supporting pupils to work collaboratively in groups with their peers
• helping pupils to contribute to group discussions
• monitoring progress and providing feedback to teachers on successes and difficulties
• reading and discussing texts with individuals or small groups to complement the guided and supported reading of the literacy hour in primary schools
• working with individuals and groups during guided reading or writing sessions
• acting as a scribe to record ideas
• delivering national literacy strategy intervention programmes: Early literacy support (for year 1), Additional literacy support (for year 3) and Further literacy support (for year 5)
• teaching the literacy progress units at key stage 3 to small groups of pupils.

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