“I was very scared … now I am not scared”

A Woman’s Place aimed to reach out to women with English language needs, engage them in learning and help them become involved in their communities. The lessons learned will be invaluable in reaching learners with the least English language skills, says LINDA DIXON

C

hallenged both by funding cuts and by changes in legislation, local authorities are at very different stages in taking forward the strategic

planning of ESOL. Planning has been further complicated by the coalition’s slowness to set out a definition of the ‘settled communities’ priority group for English language learning. Furthermore, the UK Border Agency has introduced a requirement for newly arrived spouses to the UK to have proof of a basic level of English language. Despite these changes and challenges, there is no doubt that valuable work has happened on the ground to begin to implement A New Approach to English for Speakers of Other Languages, the strategy announced by the previous government in May 2009. The strands of activity in A Woman’s Place – a NIACE project to engage women with English language needs from minority ethnic communities – have complemented local planning, through pilots, workshops for local authorities and practitioner training. Lessons learned from the project will be invaluable in moving forward to reach learners with the least English language skills. This article describes some of those lessons. A Woman’s Place was funded by the Euro-

pean Integration Fund and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and managed by NIACE. It ran from May 2009 to December 2010. The joint funding enabled learning provision for women who were new arrivals to the UK but also members of settled communities. The aim of the project was to reach out to women with low levels of English language skills and to provide engaging and interesting learning activities that would encourage them to become involved in their communities and signpost them to ESOL classes. A small pilot phase, undertaken at the beginning of 2009 across three London boroughs (Tower Hamlets, Islington and

26 ADULTS LEARNING JANUARY 2011

Newham), was cited in A New Approach as an example of good practice. The pilot project developed a toolkit that included lessons learned and case study examples. It was widely disseminated as part of the national phase, timed to complement the piloting and roll-out of A New Approach across 31 local authorities. NIACE worked in close partnership with other agencies, managing and advising on the process. The project’s activities were based on

the findings of research by NIACE’s Jane Ward and Rachel Spacey, published as Dare to Dream: Learning journeys of Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Somali women. The researchers interviewed 100 Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Somali women, 62 of them not taking part in organised learning and 38 learning English. A planning and outreach framework emerged from the research that started with the women’s attitudes to learning and considered the existing barriers (practical, emotional and cultural) to learning and how they might be overcome through practical strategies. A Woman’s Place introduced the framework to each of its strands of activity and worked to develop it further in line with the comments received from local authority staff and ESOL practitioners and managers. The project comprised three main

strands: workshops in each region for local- authority staff leading on ESOL, to clarify the expectations of A New Approach and to introduce the work of A Woman’s Place; 10 pilot projects (one in each English region, two in London) to find women in their communities with the least skills in English language and to plan and provide innovative learning opportunities to encourage women to take up language learning in the future; and 10 practitioner training workshops to inform practitioners of lessons learned from the pilot project and of the expectations of A New Approach, and to help them start to think

about how they could respond to the policy requirements. Ten pilot organisations were chosen from

the 100 that applied. They were given a small grant of £1,000 each, in acknowledgement of the government’s statement that there would be no more money other than the annual £300 million already spent on ESOL provision. In what follows, I look at the experiences of two of the pilot organisations, reflecting on how they identified communities in their local area and put on appropriate and interesting activities, and how the women benefited by being involved.

North Somerset Community Learning Having realised that schools in the county were experiencing a steep rise in the number of children whose first language was not English, North Somerset Community Learning developed a programme to bring schools and families together. The programme was managed by Cerlei Ioris, Community Development Worker, and Caroline Ash- worth, tutor. They offered a programme that embedded English language learning in topic-based sessions that would benefit everyone. The programmes had been piloted and proved to be very popular at a number of primary and secondary schools across North Somerset. A group of Asian parents, the majority of whom were under 30 years old and from Sylhet, Bangladesh, took part in the pilot at Yeo Moor Junior school in Clevedon, north Somerset. The aim of the programme was to help parents to support their children at home and to be able to communicate with the school more effectively. In order to reach the women, initial contact

was made with local schools, parent support advisers and the extended schools teams. The schools provided a list, from school registers, of women from families whose first language was not English. Letters were then