Supporting Parents with English as an Additional Language
Every school has them. The parents who smile warmly at the classroom door, nod at everything you say, take the letter home — and then nothing happens. The trip form doesn't come back. The parents' evening slot goes unbooked. The reading record stays blank. It would be easy to read that as disinterest, but in a great many cases it is nothing of the sort. It is a parent who understood perhaps one word in five of what you just said, and who was far too proud, too embarrassed, or too worried about taking up your time to ask you to say it again.
Around one in five pupils in England speaks English as an additional language, and in some urban primaries that figure is closer to nine in ten. Yet school communication — the letters home, the newsletters, the hurried doorstep conversations, the class group chats — is still overwhelmingly designed for confident English readers. If your school is serious about parent engagement, that gap is probably the largest one you have left to close.
How a Language Barrier Quietly Becomes an Engagement Barrier
It rarely starts with anything dramatic. A parent misses a non-uniform day. Then they miss the deadline for the swimming payment. Then they don't come to the curriculum evening because they aren't sure whether it is for parents or children, and asking feels like admitting something. Each small miss makes the next conversation slightly harder, until a family who genuinely wants to be involved has drifted to the edge of school life entirely.
The effect on children is measurable. Pupils whose parents understand what is happening at school get more support with homework, better attendance, and far smoother transitions. The effect on staff is measurable too, just in the opposite direction: chasing forms, re-explaining arrangements at the gate, and fielding the same question from six different families is exactly the kind of invisible admin that eats a teacher's week. Supporting EAL families well is not an add-on to your workload — done properly, it is one of the quickest ways to reduce teacher workload.
This Is a Safeguarding Issue, Not Just an Inclusion One
It is worth being blunt about this with governors and SLT. If a parent cannot read your medical consent form, you do not have informed consent. If they cannot understand an absence notification, your attendance follow-up is built on sand. If a safeguarding conversation depends on a sibling translating for their own family, you have a problem that no policy document will fix. Language access sits underneath almost every statutory duty a school has, which is why it deserves a proper line in your communication strategy rather than a goodwill effort from whichever member of staff happens to speak Polish.
Now ask how each one reaches a parent who reads little or no English.
If the honest answer for most of them is "we hope someone helps them," that is your improvement plan written for you.
Plain English Comes Before Translation
Before you reach for any technology, look at how you write. School communication is famously dense with jargon that means nothing outside the profession — phonics screening, pupil premium, interventions, Development Matters, enrichment, inset. Even a fluent English speaker who did not go to school in the UK will stumble over those terms, and automatic translation handles clear, short sentences far better than it handles a 60-word paragraph with three subclauses and an acronym.
The discipline is simple. One idea per sentence. Dates written out in full rather than as w/c 14th. The action the parent needs to take placed in the first line, not buried in paragraph four. Numbers and times made explicit. It takes a few minutes longer to write and saves everybody considerably longer afterwards — and your English-speaking parents will quietly thank you for it too.
A parent who cannot read the letter has not chosen to disengage. They have simply never been invited in a language they can accept the invitation in.
Where the Right Tools Change the Picture
This is where school communication tools earn their place. A platform like Parent Portal includes multi-language support across the interface alongside automatic message translation, which means a teacher writes once in English and each family reads it in the language they have chosen. There is no separate letter to prepare, no bilingual teaching assistant pulled out of class to translate at 3pm, and no delay between an announcement going out and a family understanding it.
The practical knock-on effects matter more than the feature itself. Absence reporting becomes something a parent can do from their phone in their own language instead of a phone call they dread making. Parents' evening bookings arrive through the app rather than through a paper slip that may never be read, and virtual consultations mean a family member who speaks more English can join from elsewhere. Payments for clubs and trips stop depending on whether a parent decoded the letter in the book bag. Custom forms collect medical and consent information in a format families can actually work through.
Pictures and Voices Cross Language Lines
One of the most underrated things about modern observation tools is that they barely need language at all. A photo of a child balancing on a beam, a short video of them counting out conkers, a 40-second voice note from their teacher describing a breakthrough moment in phonics — these land with a parent regardless of their reading level. Over a term, those EYFS and Key Stage observations build a picture of a child's learning that no end-of-year report written in formal English could convey to a family still learning the language.
Schools using Parent Portal often find EAL families are among the most responsive to photo and voice observations, precisely because they finally have a window into the school day that doesn't require them to decode anything. Engagement frequently begins there and then spreads outwards into homework, events and conversations.
Since moving our communication onto Parent Portal, messages reach families in their own language the moment we send them, and absence reporting has stopped being a daily phone chase.
The biggest change has been parents' evening — attendance from our EAL families went from just over half to almost everyone.
— Deputy Head, two-form entry primary, Greater Manchester
Measure It, Or It Won't Improve
Good intentions rarely survive a busy term, so give yourself numbers to look at. Compare form return rates, parents' evening attendance and app engagement between your EAL families and the rest of your community. If there is a gap, you have something specific to work on; if it closes, you have evidence for your governors and your Ofsted conversations about inclusion and community engagement.
A Realistic Place to Start
You do not need a six-month project. Start by asking every family which language they would prefer to hear from school in and record it properly in your school admin software rather than in someone's memory. Turn on translation for your highest-volume communications. Rewrite your three most important forms in plain English. Share one photo or voice observation per child per week. Then look at your numbers again at the end of term.
The broader shift in edtech 2025 is away from systems that simply broadcast at parents and towards platforms that meet each family where they are — in their language, on their phone, in a format they can act on. For schools with diverse communities, that is not a minor convenience. It is the difference between a parent body you communicate with and one that genuinely communicates back.
Comments