This year NATECLA formed its first UK ESOL Policy Group.  We firmly believe that there needs to be national esol strategies across the UK and that this is vital to learners and communities across the kingdom. The group has been formed to share information on policy and practice and support collaboration across the nations.

Secondly the English ESOL Policy group remains strong with a number of new members contributing with expertise, knowledge and ideas.  We have gone through a period of taking stock of our current position and planning for the future, particularly with an upcoming election and parties focusing on manifestos.

In relation to ESOL policy, NATECLA and the University of Bristol have agreed to support each other's projects, recognising that both contribute to the broader goal of effective support for migrant learners. 

This involves the University of Bristol working with Natecla to: 

- provide research and insight to identify relevant policymakers and preparation for meetings with these policymakers.

- provide evidence summaries and policy reviews to support National ESOL Strategy and other initiatives.

- will help to develop projects, partnering in the research process and disseminate findings.

And together NATECLA and the University of Bristol will work together on:

- Policy development and engagement.

- Co-publishing reports and policy briefings.

- Coordinating on ESOL policy activities.

The main target for the coming year is to rewrite our call for an ESOL Strategy placing it in today's context and to relaunch it with associated activities.

This last year has also seen the formation of the UK National Managers Network which has met twice so far and is due to meet again in two weeks time.  We are averaging between 40 and 60 attendees at these meetings and have 137 members on the managers WhatsApp group.

The network aims to:

- To share info on ESOL strategy and policy.

- Understand local and regional positions.

- To support us in establishing local groups of providers and stakeholders.

- It also provides networking opportunities for managers across the UK.

The network has been a great success and has raised NATECLA’s profile further as well as having a knock-on effect in growth in institutional membership. Our hopes for the next year are that there will be a greater synergy between the network and our regional branches and that it can support increasing branch participation and set up new branches where there are gaps.

NATECLA has been very active in meeting with a number of external organisations.  We will just provide an update on two of the more significant ones.

Attending and contributing to the Skills for Life Alliance, a group which includes The Learning and Work Institute, the Association of Colleges, the Education and Training Foundation, AeLP and Holex. The group campaigns for the Skills for Life strategy for improving adult literacy and numeracy skills, as well as ESOL and Digital Skills.

We have also had meetings with Ofqual which have been positive. We discussed the report Understanding ESOL Skills for Life qualifications. At these meetings, amongst other things we emphasised that qualification time needs to be appropriate to language acquisition and at least 360 hrs per level. We discussed the valuable role of non-accredited provision and RARPA for low level ESOL learners, who have such widely varying starting points.  More recently Ofqual have asked us to join an ESOL Reference Group .

And of course we continue to issue public statements about issues that directly affect ESOL teachers and their learners. We issued a statement following the publication of the 2021 Census.  The data here showed that 1,040,332 adults cannot speak English or speak it well, a number that has actually increased since the Census of 2011, showing the increased need for ESOL provision. In our statement we urged the Government to act and implement a joined up strategy in the support of ESOL.

NATECLA has worked very closely with the Education and Training Foundation (ETF).

Earlier this year there was significant concern within the community regarding the availability of the ESOL resources due to the anticipated closure of the ETF’s Excellence Gateway platform. We sent out a survey to the sector asking how important the Excellence Gateway is to you; we were astonished that in only 8 days, 841 of you responded to the survey.

As a result Mary and Jenny have been working incredibly hard with the ETF to confirm which resources should be retired, and have ensured that resources of most value to the ESOL community are transferred to the new platform.  Regular meetings took place to discuss resources to ensure they were not lost and there were opportunities to download any resources that were being retired.

The new ETF platform and replicated Nexus courses are due to be available this summer 2023. 

We’d of course like to thank Mary and Jenny for all of their hard work and effort in voluntarily supporting the ongoing access to these valuable resources, and we also welcome the ETF back to our conference this year.

We have continued to increase our membership base. Whilst our individual membership category has dipped a little bit, we acknowledge this is mainly due to an increase in our institutional membership numbers which has almost doubled in the last two years

Our new branches have become established and events in the regions and nations have taken off.  We are still looking to expand our branches so contact us if your area of the UK is not covered! Our online events, mainly the fortnightly CPD webinars have once again been so successful, with many selling out. We are happy to continue with these webinars and base them on the topics you tell us you need.  

Finally, our inhouse CPD offer has grown considerably and we would like to thank every organisation who has entrusted us with their bespoke ESOL CPD this year.