The impact of the Gorton and Denton by-election continues to ripple outwards, with much discussion centring on the winning Green Party’s use of campaign literature in multiple languages.

Kemi Badenoch has since unveiled the Conservative Party’s plans to tackle what she describes as “separatism” in Britain, including the launch of a cultural and integration commission tasked with producing a national cohesion plan.

As CEO of CORE Education Trust, I’d hope any such commission would consider the work we do on integration to see how schools are already leading the way in this area.

Of particular interest would be the CORE Hello programme that we have run for five years, which helps to rapidly develop English language acquisition for children who are newly arrived to the UK - while also building understanding of British culture and civic life.

To date, more than 150 students from over 30 countries, including asylum-seeking, refugee and migrant children, speaking 25 languages, have completed the programme, and it’s constantly growing.

Rapid language acquisition

At the programme’s core (no pun intended), students follow an intensive 12-week personalised pathway focused on reading, writing, listening and speaking, enabling swift academic integration.

CORE Hello is delivered by specialist teachers at one of our schools, City Academy in Ladywood, Birmingham. Students then reintegrate into their mainstream school.

We are also in the process of opening a further local CORE Hello at another one of our schools, Jewellery Quarter Academy (JQA), which would see students from JQA accessing the provision at their own school.

Students use bilingual dictionaries, multilingual translators and iPads, with explicit teaching on how to integrate these tools into a language-rich curriculum.

Lessons employ high-quality English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) strategies, including visual scaffolding, dual coding, sentence stems, modelling, structured talk, vocabulary pre-teaching, translanguaging and comprehensible input.

Literacy and English are taught daily, with a focus on spelling, punctuation, grammar and exploration of a range of texts and authors. Maths is also delivered daily, and science, humanities, arts, PE and PSHE are taught weekly.

This helps students to grasp key concepts quickly, engage in higher-order thinking and participate confidently in subject learning, removing language barriers and accelerating progress.

Assessment is conducted using the Bell Foundation’s framework assessment tool, a widely recognised tool for evaluating EAL progress.

Since the programme’s launch, every CORE Hello student has progressed across all four strands (reading, writing, listening and speaking), with a third of learners achieving a full Bell Foundation band of progress, and some effectively compressing a year’s worth of learning into several months.

This all helps to make schools and wider life in the UK a lot less daunting and enables these young people to start feeling part of their new community.

Cultural understanding

However, learning the language alone is not enough - we want students to start to truly feel a sense of belonging, which is a key driver of educational attainment and wellbeing.

That’s why CORE Hello also provides extensive opportunities for students to continue their learning and social integration.

Visits to the local library, theatre trips and outings to museums and art galleries regularly take place, and an orienteering tour of the city helps students to navigate their city with confidence.

We have also organised residentials and trips to local nature parks. At Christmas time, we arranged for students to go to Birmingham’s German-themed Christmas market.

This helps to enrich language skills, cultural understanding and social confidence. All of which are also essential for classroom participation and developing strong oracy and conversational skills.

Everyday experiences

In addition, we’ve expanded this to cover more everyday experiences like visiting a supermarket to use a self-scan checkout, which will be unknown to children from countries like Afghanistan or Yemen.

We take the students shopping using a range of different public transport options, such as buses and trains.

This helps to ensure that they understand how to purchase tickets and read timetables when travelling independently.

The West Midlands Police and other civic partners also work with us to deliver sessions on safety, citizenship and community life, strengthening trust in institutions and local knowledge.

These sessions have been on topics including keeping safe in the community and road and traffic awareness.

Celebrating success

The UK remains one of the world’s most successful multicultural societies - and schools have a major role to play in this.

After all, they are often the first and most consistent public institutions that newly arrived families encounter. If these families are welcomed properly, we lay the foundations for wider community cohesion.

Any national integration plan should recognise schools not simply as places of academic instruction, but as civic anchors. CORE Hello has shown that integration is something we can build deliberately and successfully, together.

Jo Tyler is CEO of CORE Education Trust, a multi-academy trust with four schools in Birmingham