6. Barriers to access and learning Access 6.1 The obstacles cited by potential ESOL students as preventing them from participating in learning are similar to those mentioned by other adult non-learners. These include insufficient time as a result of family or work commitments, inadequate information, poor advice and guidance, the potential cost of study, a lack of suitable flexible provision locally, inadequate transport or lack of affordable childcare. Case study 9 K. was not able to complete an ESOL course at a college in South London as she lives in Westminster and found the cost of travel too great a burden. The course at this college was ideal for her, as she wished to train as a nurse and was aiming to progress to the ESOL for Nurses course. She had gained basic ESOL skills and, with help from her adviser from St Mungo's Community Housing Association, had been successful in finding a placement with a hospital. The college was unable to find financial support to meet the travel costs and she could not take up the course. 6.2 ESOL learners are then often further hampered because of ineffective assessment and support and by the lack of a consistent approach across the country. In some areas there is little tutor expertise in rigorous ESOL assessment and few suitably robust and reliable ESOL diagnostic tests. Inadequate pre-course advice and guidance results from insufficient knowledge about the range of opportunities available and lack of understanding of the equivalence between overseas and British qualifications. This is in sharp contrast with some other European countries, such as France, where there are well developed and fully funded qualification recognition services. 6.3 Long waiting lists often result in large classes which may not allow for sufficient student interaction and oral practice or which include too wide a range of language levels. Many students want to learn quickly for substantial numbers of hours a week but this intensive provision is not always available. In rural and other areas where there are few ESOL learners there is often either a complete lack of suitable provision or a tendency to put ESOL learners and basic skills learners in the same class, even though their needs are very different. 6.4 Moreover, for refugee ESOL learners, these barriers are all too often compounded by cultural dislocation, emotional distress and trauma at being resettled in a strange country. Lack of money prevents some from travelling to classes. Learning environments can feel hostile or patronising with a culturally insensitive curriculum. Some students may experience racism - an experience all too often shared by those who have been settled here longer term. Case study 10 M. is from Somalia and lives in an inner city area. He enrolled for English classes but his attendance was irregular. His family suffered a campaign of racist attacks when he was first housed in the area. People used to spit at him and his children in the street and rubbish and excrement was pushed through his letter box. Next his 8 year old son was pushed in the path of a car which fortunately stopped before it hit him. His house was fire bombed, and his wife suffered a miscarriage as a result of falling down stairs as the family escaped from the burning house. After this he was rehoused in a different area of the city. 6.5 One other important aspect of access demands consideration: the role that employers can and in some cases do play in helping inform potential learners about ESOL classes, in organising provision themselves and operating a flexible approach to working time to enable learners to improve their language skills. Very few employers provide ESOL programmes themselves but a number of large service employers, for example, do employ individuals with poor standards of English. More should be done locally and nationally in partnership with employers to help develop good practice. Organisation of learning 6.6 Once on courses, ESOL students are likely to experience a range of special problems peculiar to their needs and very different from those of fluent English speakers who are improving their basic skills. 6.7 It is very common for ESOL classes to consist of mixed ability groups and include individuals with very different ranges of skills in oracy, writing and numeracy and, because of their different educational backgrounds, different abilities in study skills. Some students will have poor basic skills in their own language. Some may be unfamiliar with the Latin script. Many will be used to a very different pronunciation system and thus not be able to associate sounds and symbols. Many others may be used to different grammatical conventions. All will face the barrier of the phonetically irregular spelling system of English and some may need to retrain themselves to write in a different direction. Case study 11 Y. is from a rural area in Pakistan. He attended school for only 2 years and is not literate in his first language. He enrolled for English classes at his local further education college but seemed to be making little progress in comparison to his peers who were all European migrant workers who were literate in their first language. The course tutors had little experience of teaching students with Y's educational background and were concerned about his slow progress. They decided this was because he had learning difficulties and referred him for a learning support assessment. At this point he left the course 6.8 Equally, different experiences and needs in relation to numeracy should not be overlooked. Some learners may be highly numerate but need to learn English mathematical terms and conventions. Others may be used to doing computation in quite a different way or simply have basic numeracy needs. Others may have good mathematical skills but be hampered by the complexity of the language surrounding assessment tasks and tests. 6.9 There are cultural differences too which may be encountered as barriers. Students may be used to a more formal approach than is generally used in post-16 education in this country. They are also likely to encounter cultural barriers to understanding in texts that are designed with native learners in mind - for example, a GNVQ student was asked to assess an advertising poster for a new hot breakfast cereal which boasted that it was very popular in Scotland. Because she was not familiar with porridge and its connections with Scotland, she was unable to complete the task. 6.10 This means the curriculum and the methodology for teaching basic literacy and numeracy needs to be different from that for fluent English speakers. This is considered in more depth in Section 10. 6.11 Other hindrances to effective ESOL provision include too few bilingual tutors, too few supported bridges, such as access courses, into mainstream provision and insufficient language support within that provision. Case study 12 E. arrived from Ethiopia at a South London college in September 1998 and was placed in an Entry Level 1 ESOL 16-19 group. Six months into her course she moved up to an Entry Level 2/3. N., arriving from Bangladesh, moved up over a similar period from Entry Level 2/3 to Level. 1 Both students were studying an Entry Key Skills ESOL/Basic Skills 16-19 curriculum with vocational tasters that included Business Administration. Both students were accepted onto NVQ Level 2 Business Administration. After 3 weeks N. chose to return to a Basic Skills 16-19 group saying that her main difficulty was understanding the English used in the Business assignments. N. is interested in the NVQ 1 Business Administration with attached NVQ in English language being piloted September 2000 to facilitate progression. E. has been struggling, since the jump to level 2 was considerable and the language demands of Business English are particularly high. However she has remained on the NVQ Business Administration by attending a 16-19 Basic Skills class for extra support during sessions which do not clash with her timetable. Funding and the structure of provision 6.12 The current FEFC funding system has been designed to offer considerable flexibility and incentives in the delivery of ESOL, including automatic fee remission, double entry units for shorter courses, higher cost weighting for the on-programme element, a widening participation factor uplift and a mechanism whereby providers can claim for the costs of putting in place a range of additional support which will enable ESOL learners to succeed. 6.13 However, the extent to which these incentives are utilised and applied in practice by individual providers seems variable and some front-line practitioners clearly feel that the regimes under which they operate can create anomalies or difficulties for learners: eligibility for funding for learners who are not EU or EEA nationals is based on nationality and residence status as defined by the Home Office. This means that some categories of students, for example new spouses, may have to wait until they receive settled status for acceptance as a home student and valuable learning time can be lost; although the FEFC clearly recognises the additional resources needed for this area of work and reflects this in funding incentives, some practitioners still feel that there is inadequate allowance within the tariff system for the high costs of outreach work, curriculum development, and bilingual assessment which are all needed if ESOL provision is to be effective; for administrative reasons or because they perceive them as more cost effective than short courses, a number of FEFC funded providers still tend to run courses from September to July. These have a significantly higher risk of drop out than shorter courses due to re-settlement of refugees or benefit, housing or medical problems; capping of FEFC funding allocations has sometimes meant there has been no access to additional funding mid-year to meet new demands and sudden increases in refugee populations; the full value of the higher cost weighting factor (CWF C) within FEFC funding systems sometimes may not be passed on within the institution directly to the budget for ESOL provision; colleges have sometimes failed to recognise that, since 1998, students eligible for ESOL support but who are taking EFL qualifications because this best suits their learning needs remain eligible for support; there are still misapprehensions about the funding system, for example that external accreditation is essential. This sometimes seems to encourage providers to offer qualifications which are less appropriate but score a higher unit value.

Back

Home

Next