Grassroots policy-making in ESOL: Learning English Yorkshire & the Humber

James Simpson, Chair of Trustees, MESH, writes about the work of MESH and the development of the Learning English (Yorkshire & the Humber) online resource

Imagine two scenarios for the provision, planning and coordination of English language education for adult migrants. In Scenario One, classes are free to all who need them, are well-informed by curriculum development, are taught in well-equipped spaces by professional teachers, and are located where they need to be. Courses are embedded in mainstream adult education, with clear progression routes to higher levels and to other areas of study.

An alternative scenario sees many potential students being priced out of much professional ESOL provision, while what remains is incoherent and fragmented, sitting outside education policy, with isolated classes taught by teachers who have not received adequate training, and reliant on volunteers. Moreover, in this scenario the national government of the day views access to English for migrants not as a crucial area of adult education but a gatekeeper in immigration policy.

Over the past decade, the situation for ESOL in England has tended towards the second extreme, and in policy the field has had to manage on its own. Between 2002 and 2009 ESOL was positioned within a reasonably well-funded national policy framework, Skills for Life, as an adult basic skill, alongside literacy and numeracy. This was no nirvana: Government-sponsored research in Leeds and London (EEPP, Baynham et al 2007) identified issues with ESOL planning and coordination under Skills for Life, concluding that there was still work to do: 

• Clear trajectories through provision were required, to cater for specialisations. 
• Pathways needed to be flexible to ensure that the learning was responsive to changing ESOL populations. 
• Progression for those in isolated classes, not joined up to mainstream provision, was frequently slower than those already in the mainstream. 
• Although competent in spoken English, students’ literacy development would be held back due to fewer options available in community-based classes. 

These coordination concerns remained unaddressed, however, and when Skills for Life was terminated in 2009, Adult ESOL found itself outside any national policy framework. Control of ESOL was handed to local authorities under the New Approach to ESOL (2009); the change of government in 2010 heralded ‘austerity measures’, and local government services – including the provision and coordination of ESOL – were cut to the bone. Within a couple of years, a study of local ESOL provision commissioned by Leeds City Council (HENNA, Simpson et al 2011) found that:

• ESOL provision is fragmented locally and city-wide, and is in urgent need of coordination.
• The complexity of provision and funding raises questions of continuity, coherence and quality of tuition for the benefit of students.
• For successful sustained learning, progression and progression routes need to be meaningful, clear and coordinated. However, lack of continued and stable funding streams disrupts progression routes both between ESOL courses of different levels, and from ESOL into training and work.

At national scale things have not improved in the intervening decade. ESOL remains fundamentally uncoordinated and under-funded, with responsibility oscillating between the Department for Education, the Home Office, and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Central Government funding for ESOL provided by Further Education colleges is mainly through the Education and Skills Funding Agency's adult skills budget. This fell by over £100 million in the first six years of Conservative rule, leaving much ESOL provision outside the FE mainstream, in the hands of third sector providers. For these, funding arrives piecemeal as project funding, e.g. from the Controlling Migration fund (MHCLG) and the Syrian Vulnerable Person’s Resettlement Scheme (VPRS, Home Office). A promised national strategy for ESOL shows no sign of materialising in the short or medium term, despite heavy lobbying by NATECLA since 2015. In the broader political sphere, migrants, especially asylum seekers, continue to be subject to a sustained campaign of hostility. Positive, focused attention on their language education is unlikely to become a policy priority for the current Government.

Responding to the obvious need for coherence of provision, and in the absence of national direction, grass-roots efforts have been made to address local concerns about coordination and planning for ESOL. In Leeds, these have coalesced around the work of MESH, the Migrant English Support Hub, formed in 2013. MESH is an innovative consortium of adult learning providers and other stakeholders including Local Authority policy actors. Our aim at MESH – now a registered charity – is to support access to English language classes for adult migrants, originally in Leeds (home to large numbers of potential learners and an important dispersal area for asylum-seekers) and now region-wide. The Learning English in Leeds (LEL) website, the first MESH initiative was a comprehensive coordinating hub for English language provision in Leeds, listing all existing English language education providers and their classes, and funded through a series of small grants from Leeds City Council.

Fast-forward to 2019. MESH is now in partnership with Migration Yorkshire, the regional body which provides coordination on migration issues in the Yorkshire & Humber region, including support for migrant integration. The partnership has developed a region-wide version of LEL, the Learning English Yorkshire & the Humber (LEY&H) website. This work, and associated networking activity, is currently funded through the VPRS and MHCLG. Its aims are:

• To increase awareness of and access to ESOL provision for migrants across the Yorkshire & Humber region.
• To increase knowledge of current ESOL provision including gaps and barriers, for Local Authorities and a broader strategic audience including the Home Office and MHCLG as well as local ESOL providers.
• To enable any additional resources for ESOL to be better targeted to address gaps, meet needs and avoid duplication.

The site aspires to list all English language provision for new arrivals in the region, the outcome of an extensive mapping exercise. 

This is a successful local initiative to address the neglect of ESOL coordination at national scale. Page views peaked at over 5000 per month in October 2019. Though they dipped severely in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, they have risen again – to around 2500 per month in July, and with over 600 individual users. The City of Bradford Metropolitan District has recently joined the LEY&H, and to celebrate this and the beginning of the new academic year we are re-launching the site between 1^st and 11^th September 2020. 

With much ESOL activity now happening virtually, LEY&H has become a valuable resource for finding online classes. Our networking activities have also moved onto Zoom, and  we have teamed up with NATECLA, and other organisations such as York St John University, for a series of online seminars and networking events aimed at isolated ESOL tutors looking for contact with an ESOL community as well as advice and guidance about teaching online. 

The LEY&H and its predecessor LEL feature as case studies of good practice in the L&WI resource for local ESOL coordination and NATECLA’s draft ESOL Strategy for England, are cited as examples of a successful local approach in the 2018 Integrated Communities Green Paper, and in the influential DEMOS report More Than A Language. More importantly, its users report its usefulness. In our recent evaluation activity 100% of respondents agreed that the website helps to increase awareness of and access to ESOL provision, and 100% of networking event participants agreed that these had been useful for them, for example in sharing information about ESOL provision and practice and in building ESOL networks. 

MESH occupies an interesting position, between policy and practice. LEY&H is not a national Government policy initiative, though it currently relies on central Government funding, in a roundabout way. Nor is MESH part of local Government, though the organisation is working with a regional-level body hosted by a local authority. LEY&H does not provide ESOL classes, but its Development Workers liaise directly and closely with ESOL providers and tutors. Its success is due to our insider/outsider policy/practice position: because of this we can re-interpret local contexts responsively, in a fast-moving policy landscape. 

The success remains small-scale, however. The MESH concept has taken what worked in a local area (Leeds), and developed it through networking and coordination to an effective regional-level resource. This has taken time, and has not yet spread nationwide: it remains one of only a handful of local or regional initiatives to spring up in response to a lack of coordination at national level. This relates of course to the bigger picture, familiar to all who work in ESOL. That is, central Governments are keen to exhort people to speak English, but unwilling to support structured opportunities for them to do so. Adult migrants on the whole are left to fend for themselves when locating opportunities to learn.