Are you meeting your Equality duty?
Your Equality duty is your legal duty to:
- Eliminate discrimination, harassment, victimisation, and any other prohibited conduct.
- Advance quality of opportunity.
- Foster good relations between people.
There are various actions a school or setting should take in order to meet this duty:
- Set our your Equality objectives.
- Have a clear Equality policy.
- Have a zero tolerance on racism and ensure school staff are confident in recognising different forms of racism. Our recently published One-minute guide on understanding racism is a great start, that also provides positive prevention measures.
- Embed a translation app on your website.
- Ensure you are meeting the needs of your children, through intervention, EAL support, culturally inclusive meals and ensuring they are reflected within your school community.
We are also seeing an increasing number of parents/guardians and community teams contact us to express concerns over the lack of support for school/setting meetings, such as attendance, Early help and safeguarding discussions. For bilingual families it is crucial that you arrange a professional interpreter to ensure that there is clear open communication. This is a key part of your Equality duty and is the best way to support children.
Visit the Devon education services shop to download your free copy of our Equality and diversity policy exemplar for schools and EYFS.
We are also hosting an Equality, diversity and inclusion seminar in 2025, to provide you with the opportunity to develop your understanding further.
EAL and reading
Reading is an integral part to any child’s development. For EAL children it can provide an opportunity to develop their new language whilst being immersed in their own imagination.
Supporting EAL learners with their reading can easily be done using transferable strategies you most likely have developed in your classroom already.
Strategies you can use are:
- Pre teaching – using intervention time to explore new words and sentence structures. It is also an opportunity to explore themes that might not be common to some children. For example books containing beach themes or amusement parks, might be an unfamiliar concept to them.
- Bilingual reading books. You can find these in online bookshops and we also have a handful on our resources website. These are a fantastic way to not only develop English, but build proficiency I their home lange and are ideal for home learning tasks.
- Using short beginner comprehension sheets can break down reading into manageable chunks.
- Check their understanding by exploring questions around the theme of the book.
- Organise reading buddies – collaborative reading studies shows there are massive gains to both children.
- Devise follow up activities, including art work or them writing their own fictional stories. You can use graphic organisers to help them outline key content in their home language and then to translate it back to English.
- Choose books that are relevant and interesting to them, including ensuring they represent our diverse community.
- Use interactive resources to support the learning and understanding of the content.
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EAL resources
There is a wealth of amazing resources available online for EAL children. Our own website has an ever growing bank of resources and below is a short list of a few other resources that we can recommend:
The Ethnic minority and Traveller achievement service (EMTAS) and Devon School Library Service (Devon SLS) believe that every child should be ‘seen’ in their school and setting. This means ensuring that not only websites and publications reflect your school’s community but also your reading lists and children’s exposure to different cultures and identities. Through Equality, diversity, and inclusion pupil forums our Devon children have said they want to learn more about different identities and to celebrate all ethnicities, with one primary child saying ‘We are all different, we are individual jewels’.
Devon SLS and EMTAS have collaborated in response to this feedback by creating book lists for EYFS, KS1 LKS2 and UKS2 so that Devon children can continue their growth mindset journey. For further support any BPRI reporting setting can book a free BPRI clinic to discuss an incident, as well as their wide equality and diversity provision.
- The books on this list can be purchased from the School Library Service
- Individual titles can be purchased at a saving of 25% off RRP
- Please contact us at schoollibraryservice@devon.gov.uk or 01392 287244
👉Visit our website to view these books lists!
This exam season has seen 40 children take a GCSE in their Home language through EMTAS support. EMTAS supported each child and school to ensure that they were prepared for the tasks in Russian, Polish and Arabic.
Providing the opportunity for children to take this additional GCSE promotes the importance of bilingualism, as well as celebrating their home languages and supporting their overall qualifications.
Well done to all those children that took this exam and thank you to all the schools and Bilingual support workers for supporting them!
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Would you like to support a research project about
refugee and asylum-seeking students’ well-being in secondary schools?
This research project at the University of Exeter is interested in the perspectives of secondary school staff.
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Further details can be found on the UoE's flyer 👈
Eid al-Adha 16 June
Each year Muslims celebrate both Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha – but the names often get shortened to just ‘Eid’. Eid al-Adha – which means ‘feast of the sacrifice’ – is celebrated just over two months after Eid al-Fitr, at the same time when many Muslims perform the Hajj pilgrimage.
Refugee week 17 – 23 June
“To me, a home is where you feel loved, safe, and cherished.”- Malala Yousafzai
The theme for Refugee Week 2024 is “Our Home”. From the places we gather to share meals to our collective home, planet earth: everyone is invited to celebrate what our ‘Our Home’ means to them.
Home can be a place of refuge, a feeling or a state of mind. It can be found in smells, tastes and sounds. From the clothes we wear to the words we grew up with. It’s in food, music and arts. It’s in our cultures and in our landscapes.
To celebrate refugee week, we are collating short video clips of children’s thoughts on what it means to ‘be seen’ and can be done in their home language. These clips will then be compiled into a larger video. If you would like to take part please email cary-anne.ginns@devon.gov.uk
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During the month of June Ellen, our GRTS advisor has been delivering GRTHM assemblies on what family means, which is this year’s theme. Here is some of the feedback from schools:
‘We had a really interesting assembly in school with Ellen today. The children were all interested and engaged and learnt lots about the Gypsy, Roma and Travelling communities. The focus on families made it very personal and you could see the children thinking about their families and the things that made them special. We will definitely watch the video again and talk about what we have learnt in classes. Thanks Ellen!’ Kenn C of E Primary
'It was a pleasure to welcome Ellen Tout, to Stoke Hill for an assembly to share this years focus for GRTS history month.This year, exploring the theme of "What does family mean to you?". It was a great opportunity for us all to look at the different shapes and forms family can take, the relationships we have with each other, and the importance of family as a support network.' Stoke Hill Junior School
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👉 See how you can celebrate GRTHM and to enter our competition!
Gypsy, Roma, Traveller, Showmen (GRTS) education support for the Early Years.
This guide covers: educational barriers, collection of ethnicity data, partnership working, transition into school and submitting EYFS profile data.
Research briefing May 24
This briefing looks at Gypsy and Traveller education. It focuses on England. It is a useful overview of the key issues faced in education by these communities.
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👉 You can view the full research briefing on Parliament's website.
An article in The Guardian gives a flavour of Traveller culture and heritage, written by Roma photojournalist Eszter Halasi who follows a Romany family on their journey to the Appleby Horse Fair. Read the full article on The Guardian's website!
This year EMTAS would like to gather the voices of Ethnically diverse and EAL children in Devon schools on what it means to them to ‘be seen in school’. This project also coincides with refugee week occurring on 17-23 June. We will collate the video clips to create a short video and this video will be shared with schools, used on our website and future events/publications. Before publishing we will share the full video with participating schools 2 days prior and the deadline for all submissions is the 5th of July.
We are asking for your help to collate these voices by the way of short video clips, and it would be lovely if EAL children did this in their home language.
Only 4% of Devon schools homepages on their website contain a visibly ethnically diverse child or member of staff and these small things are crucial to helping a child to feel seen in school.
Through our EDI pupil forums children have told us that being seen and included in school means:
- They are represented on the school website.
- They see ethnically diverse children on school displays and notice boards.
- Their culture is celebrated through cultural days and through the curriculum.
- They have friends.
- There is a Cultural champions groups in the school.
- There is an EAL club/hub.
- They had a buddy when they first started.
- The use of their home language is promoted within the school.
- The school are flexible with homework, by considering cultural needs.
- The school has a prayer room.
- They are allowed to wear religious and cultural items along with their uniform.
- They feel safe.
- Their welcome meeting had an interpreter so they could ask every question they had.
- They feel included.
- They receive EAL intervention.
These are just a few examples.
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