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Most school group and trust leaders can tell you exactly how SEND is tracked across their organisation. Far fewer can answer the same question about multilingual learners.
As school systems scale, leadership is shifting. Leaders are no longer responsible only for the performance of individual schools, but for building organisational capability across entire networks of schools.
According to Department for Education data, the number of state schools in England joining a multi-academy trust has risen from 28% in 2019 to over 44% today. The government whitepaper, Every child achieving and thriving highlights the increasing call for schools to collaborate and innovate across trusts. I’m looking forward to seeing the growth this might bring to multilingual provision in the UK.
In international schools the picture is similar. ISC Research data shows that 38% of international schools belong to a school group, and the group model continues to accelerate.
For many of these schools, one clear pattern keeps appearing. When these leadership teams look across their schools, they can usually answer some questions very quickly:
But when the conversation turns to multilingual learners, the picture often becomes far less clear. How many multilingual learners are there across the group? How quickly are they progressing in English? Which schools within a trust are achieving the strongest outcomes?
These are strategic questions for school leaders. Yet historically, multilingual provision has often been organised locally within individual schools rather than overseen as a system-level capability.
Over the past few years, we’ve spent a lot of time working with large school organisations – both groups and trusts – such as GEMS Education and International Schools Partnership. We see some of these forward-thinking organisations addressing multilingual provision in more ambitious ways.
These groups are increasingly recognising that multilingual learner provision requires the same strategic oversight and infrastructure that already exists for safeguarding, SEND and assessment.
Multilingual provision is evolving from a local intervention into an organisational capability. And as school groups and trusts continue to scale, developing a clear EAL strategy in international school groups and across UK trusts is becoming increasingly important.
In most organisations, support for multilingual learners has grown organically. Individual schools identify pupils, design their own approaches and work hard to deliver strong outcomes.
This creates pockets of excellence and some outstanding individual practitioners. But as organisations scale, that same organic development introduces fragmentation.
Different schools define multilingual learners in different ways. Language development is tracked using inconsistent or incompatible frameworks. Data, where it exists, is often held locally and rarely visible beyond the school.
At a system level, this creates a critical visibility gap and decision-making that is reactive rather than strategic.
Leaders can’t clearly see how multilingual learners are progressing across the organisation. They cannot identify which schools are achieving the strongest outcomes, or where additional support would have the greatest impact.
Over time, this stops being a pedagogical issue and becomes a leadership risk.
Without consistent visibility, organisations risk:
For growing school groups and trusts, clear visibility of data is key to delivering strong multilingual provision and essential to effective governance.
The result is a visibility gap at the leadership level. Without consistent data, leaders cannot easily see:
As organisations scale, this stops being a pedagogical inconvenience and becomes an operational and reputational risk.
For groups and trusts developing their EAL strategy, visibility across schools is an essential component and one we’ve been looking to drive forward at FlashAcademy®.
Over the past decade, school systems have built robust infrastructure around the areas that matter most:
What they don’t have is an equivalent system for multilingual learners.
In the UK, the removal of government reporting requirements has meant EAL provision rarely receives the same treatment. I hope to see movement towards more robust provision as schools push forward with plans to meet the requirements of the new Ofsted framework.
Without prioritisation at a strategic level, multilingual support operates without the system-level architecture that would allow leaders to see it, measure it and improve it at scale. This is the gap that the most forward-thinking organisations are now closing as they develop a clear leadership strategy.
Across the international school groups and multi-academy trusts we work with, multilingual provision tends to evolve through three stages:
Stage 1 – Local intervention: Supports sits entirely within individual schools and often with a specific member of staff.
Staff identify multilingual learners and provide targeted help, sometimes brilliantly – but where responsibility is not shared across the whole school, some learners may struggle in lessons.
Visibility across the wider organisation is limited, and quality depends almost entirely on the expertise of specific individuals rather than any shared system.
Stage 2 – Coordinated provision: Leadership teams begin introducing greater consistency. Schools share frameworks, EAL leads collaborate and some central guidance exists. An understanding of shared accountability across all teaching staff develops.
This is meaningful progress, but insight across the organisation remains fragmented. You have cooperation, but not yet a system.
Stage 3 – Strategic capability: Multilingual provision becomes a core organisational function.
Leadership teams have genuine visibility across all schools. Language development is tracked consistently, enabling effective practice to be identified and replicated. A system of trusted data and insights drives provision.
This is where a mature EAL strategy for groups and trusts begins to emerge.
Leaders can direct resources where they will have the greatest impact and can demonstrate that impact to governors, inspectors and parents.
But moving to the third stage requires deliberate strategic decisions by school group and trust leaders.
Organisations that successfully build a system-wide EAL strategy tend to have three things in common:
None of this requires scrapping what individual schools have already built. In most cases, the goal is to connect existing good practice to a shared architecture that allows it to become visible, replicable and scalable across a multi-academy trust or international school group.
For international group leaders, a clear EAL strategy provides something equally valuable: the ability to ensure multilingual learners receive consistent support regardless of which school they attend within the organisation.
The most effective school groups and trusts we work with share a common understanding: that what you can’t see, you can’t improve. For multilingual learners, building that visibility, consistently, across every school, is no longer a nice-to-have. It is now the core responsibility for leaders of school groups and trusts.
Across both UK trusts and international school groups, the question is no longer whether this population deserves strategic attention. The real question is whether leadership teams have the infrastructure to provide it.
Organisations that treat EAL as a strategic organisational capability gain something beyond compliance or inspection readiness.
They gain the ability to improve outcomes for a large and often under-served cohort of multilingual learners consistently across every school in the organisation.
