Home › General › Using the Bell Assessment Framework in hybrid EAL provision

Using the Bell Assessment Framework in hybrid EAL provision

By Pete on September 17, 2024 • ( 4 )

I’ve written a few things on the Bell Assessment Framework this past year. Here were my initial reflections on implementing the framework, and some musings on how it could be improved. In this post, I share some thoughts on using Bell as part of a hybrid model of EAL provision.

What do I mean by ‘hybrid model’?

I mean that we have both push-in and pull-out provision for our EAL learners (in the high school). Our learners attend mainstream classes in all subject areas except English. They receive in-class support in mainstream classes from our EAL specialists. Their English classes (6 lessons a week) are delivered by the EAL team, rather than by mainstream teachers. We have created an in-house EAL curriculum – the images below should give you an idea of the type of content included (for one year group) and how we are linking to themes both in mainstream English and across the curriculum.

Note: these are just overview docs so detail is limited, but it should give an indication of how our adapted English provision for EAL learners plays out.

Why this approach?

I joined the school as founding EAL lead in the high school. I thought my remit would be providing in-class support with some top-up, but our team were timetabled to deliver all English lessons for EAL learners. This reduced our capacity to offer in-class support, but also made a differentiated version of the mainstream English curriculum untenable – we needed to dedicate time to reviewing content across subject areas too. We implemented this curriculum as a workaround. The first iteration was a relative success, although we’re looking to embed slightly more mainstream English content this year.

How does assessment work in our curriculum?

We essentially use three types of assessment:

Each of the ‘EAL topics’ outlined in the curriculum overview have a task-based assessment. It often forms the ‘common assessment’ for a half-term
Learners have a termly CEFR-aligned level test – after all, the CEFR and I are best of friends.
We use the Bell Assessment Framework for our ongoing assessment

How do we work the Bell Assessment Framework into this process day-to-day?

Assessment during mainstream classes – as standard!

Firstly, our EAL specialists observe learners in mainstream classes, and use the Bell Assessment Framework tracking tools to record progress and targets. In an ideal world, subject teachers would be familiar with the tool themselves, and be contributing to the data. Are they in our context? No. We are looking at onboarding subject teachers to the Bell Assessment Framework as part of our provision, but we are not ready as a school to do that this year. Luckily, we are at the stage of introducing class teachers to the Bell Framework in our Elementary school (under the expert guidance of Adri Szlapak) so ‘phase one’ is underway! Great job, Adri.

So, Bell assessment in the high school is exclusively down to the EAL team at this stage. Beyond observations in the mainstream and general (incidental) tracking, what else do we do to embed the tool in our bespoke curriculum?

Mapping Bell targets to common assessments

We map Bell targets to our common assessments. Here’s an example of our success criteria for one assessment (this one is part of the Year 8 curriculum aligning to Humanities), and how we map some Bell targets to this:

Note: Don’t ask me what happened to the detail in Content and Language points 7-8 there. Not the most thorough. But you know, this is all from scratch – first iteration and all.

Embedded ‘Bell moments’ in everyday class provision

The Bell targets are quite fluid, in-the-moment type skills to observe. They are not the type of targets you could build a whole lesson objective around (well, some might be). Even so, you can certainly plan tasks or create the conditions through which learners can demonstrate their skills.

We are going back through the first iteration of our schemes of work and flagging them for ‘Bell moments’. Notice, well, ‘the Bell’!

Flagging these moments for our purposes doesn’t mean we have to exploit them. They serve as a reminder that we could take that opportunity to informally assess learners based on descriptors in the framework. It also helps from a planning perspective. We review the content prior to teaching, realise that the lesson will include a Bell moment that we could exploit, and then we add some scaffolding accordingly (enhancing the resource for next time too!).

There are just a couple of examples of how we are adapting the Bell framework to work within our context. It may not have been intended for our type of provision, but I feel we can find ways to apply it which add some value, rigour, etc.