Online ESOL Provision – lessons from lockdown
By Su Halliday
St. Augustine’s Centre is a community centre based in Park Ward, Halifax. In addition to offering a range of support services to anyone in the local community, we are Calderdale’s specialist charity working with people seeking asylum, refugees and migrants throughout the borough. Prior to Covid 19, we offered drop in ESOL classes at the centre, but have been unable to offer any face to face provision since March as our classrooms are too small to allow for social distancing. From early on in lockdown, volunteer English tutors began working to try to move our English teaching online. Initially this was through 1:1 phone calls, emails, WhatsApp messaging and 1:1 video calls with students. Our online provision has grown month by month: a part time member of staff was appointed in July to coordinate the programme, which has expanded to a team of over 40 volunteers delivering more than 300 hours of English support each month. We continue to add new students into our classes and currently (Jan 2021) we have around 100 students regularly engaging with us and in an average week around 50 students take part in at least one language session, with many choosing to attend several. We are also reaching newly arrived asylum seekers in temporary hotel accommodation in Calderdale, offering them much needed social interaction in addition to English language support.
We are currently delivering 13 online group classes a week at beginner, intermediate and advanced level. In addition to these group classes, 44 of our centre users are paired with a volunteer for individual language support. One of the benefits of being a voluntary ESOL provider is the flexibility we have in meeting our learners’ needs. We are not tied to a course syllabus so we can be creative in utilising the interests and strengths of our volunteer tutors. We have a very wide range of provision, including volunteers doing Zoom cookery sessions with their students, poetry sessions, quizzes, basic phonics teaching and more advanced structured grammar lessons. Recently a group of students met Halifax MP Holly Lynch on Zoom. Holly talked to them about her role as an MP and the students questioned her on a range of topics including time delays and hostility in the asylum system and what she can achieve for the residents of Halifax as an opposition MP.
We are committed to working collaboratively with our centre users and welcome them as volunteers with our online English programme - supporting others to install and use Zoom, being class assistants or class tutors and as 1:1 tutors. Our centre user volunteers are gaining a sense of self-worth (as asylum seekers they are barred from working,) and in using their first language skills to overcome the technical and language barriers of remote learning, they are able to engage students that our monolingual volunteers struggle to reach. Having recent experience of learning English themselves is another great asset. For example, Volunteer N, working with 2 beginners, sends them YouTube video clips which he himself found useful as a newcomer to the UK less than a year ago.
Our Life in the UK podcast is produced by a team of volunteers. Based loosely on the syllabus for the Life in the UK citizenship test and supplemented by current affairs topics, it has listeners in more than 100 countries around the world. We are currently looking into ways to move this onto YouTube, with the help of a centre user with a background in media in her home country.
Digital inclusion
We have addressed digital inclusion in several ways. Some students didn’t have a smartphone or device to enable a video call, so a call out was made for donations of second hand equipment. This is ongoing, with a centre user volunteer now running a daily tech clinic refurbishing donated items. Very few students had Wi-Fi in their homes and were reliant upon expensive phone data. On a daily allowance of less than £6 a day for people seeking asylum, this effectively locked many out of online learning. St. Augustine’s raised money to buy 60 dongles and initially paid for 3 months data. This gave unlimited internet access to 60 households of people seeking asylum in Calderdale, including many houses of multiple occupation. After the initial 3 months, with Covid restrictions ongoing, the data provision was extended for a further 6 months and we purchased an additional 25 dongles. We are now providing internet access to more than half of the asylum seekers’ households in Calderdale. The impact of this has been huge and is something which we hope to build on in future.
Volunteers’ technical know-how
Few of our volunteers had every used Zoom before lockdown, nor attempted online teaching. Creating a paid co-ordinator post in July has been essential in upskilling the volunteer team, teaching volunteers how to use Zoom and other online apps. Developing volunteers’ confidence from working with one student on an individual basis, to being able to teach a group class online, has meant that we have been able to reach far more students. Harnessing the technical skills of our centre users has also been invaluable in overcoming these barriers; for example one tutor team teaches a beginners class with a tech savvy centre user who manages the screen sharing and online whiteboard whilst she leads on the English.
Individual stories:
Student B has just had her first baby. She has been supported throughout her pregnancy by an individual volunteer who has focused lessons on the essential vocabulary the student needed to know related to becoming a new mum.
Student K is a single parent living alone with a toddler. She doesn’t know anyone in the UK and is very isolated. When the English Language Coordinator first tried to talk to K about joining a class, she said she hadn’t spoken to anyone for such a long time, she felt she had lost all confidence and was too scared to take part in a class. After a few conversations with the coordinator, K agreed to be paired with a 1:1 volunteer and is now talking non-stop during her weekly sessions.
Student H has two very young children at home. She had been attending in person beginners classes at St. Augustine’s for a couple of years before lockdown, but had missed a lot of lessons due to the difficulties of attending with her babies. Since June she has joined a group class online twice a week and rarely misses a session. She is now able to speak in sentences and is building up her vocabulary from one week to the next. Her beaming smile when she logs into the Zoom class says it all.
What learning have we gained from this project?
Many of our volunteer tutors have gained new skills in technology which we hope to be able to build on in future by adding laptops and projectors to our classrooms when we return to face to face classes and by continuing to offer some online provision for those students who can’t come to the centre for classes.
We have all gained from opportunities to connect with others during the pandemic, which has undoubtedly strengthened the St. Augustine’s community and has highlighted the range of skills which our centre users are able to offer to others (including repairing phones and laptops, teaching skills, connecting others to Zoom, translating instructions into multiple languages, making user guides to support students and tutors and so much more.) Working with our centre users and enabling them to be active contributors rather than just recipients of support is a key part of the centre’s vision for the future. We are proud of the work we have done in the last few months to develop our English Language Programme and we are excited about what we might do next.
Su Halliday, English Language Programme Coordinator