Great Barr Academy is the second largest school in Europe, with capacity for over 2,500 pupils. It currently has about 600 EAL pupils who speak over 20 different home languages. The diversity of home languages as well as the large number of EAL pupils can be very hard to manage for teachers at the school.
The school has recently introduced the FlashAcademy® EAL platform, which allows pupils to learn English from their home language through engaging lessons and fun games.
Teachers at the school have particularly enjoyed the fact that pupils can use the platform independently, allowing them to teach the rest of the class and help the pupils who are struggling. Even pupils with low proficiency in English seem to be getting on well with FlashAcademy®. The school believes it is important for EAL pupils to be in the same classroom as the other children, even if they aren’t given the same tasks.
“We have implemented a structured hour of FlashAcademy® EAL at 3pm each day. When it gets close to 3pm, pupils now start reminding us to get the iPads out for FlashAcademy® and there’s a lot of excitement in the room.”
“The platform has had a huge impact on the work load of our teachers. In terms of lesson preparation, resources preparation, marking, it does all of that for you, so it really lightens the load for them, the pupils enjoy it, it feeds me the data that I need, and it really does work from every aspect of an EAL department. Also, the leaderboards feed into the competitive nature of the children, which they just love too.”
“I would wholeheartedly recommend FlashAcademy® to other schools with any kind of EAL challenge. It has literally revolutionised my department as far as I’m concerned. We are going to be long-standing users of FlashAcademy® and I am excited about the journey that we are going to go on together.”
Hollie O’Sullivan, Head of EAL at Great Barr Academy
Read the first blog article we wrote about Great Barr Academy.
