EAL student voice

By Pete on May 24, 2025 • ( 0 )

We request feedback on our EAL provision from learners twice a year – towards the end of Term 1 and Term 3. We are open to further feedback at any point, but that’s just when we request it.

How do we get feedback from learners?

We gather it using a Google form:

The majority of items on the form involve learners responding to statements about our provision using linear scales. A couple of examples:

(My line manager is like ‘never list 5 options, only 4!’ but I fell into that trap).

There are quite a lot of statements that range in purpose. For example, some focus on social inclusion, some on wellbeing, some on academic progress, etc. Here are more examples at random:

I feel supported by my EAL teachers
I feel safe talking to my EAL teachers
I understand other subjects more because my EAL teacher explains it again in their classes
I feel comfortable speaking English to friends who don’t speak my language
I feel more confident in my subject classes when I have in-class support from my EAL teachers

Etc!

Then, we use the student voice to identify subject areas in which learners feel they need more support. Here’s an example:

We ask about all subjects, and we tend to break down the questions to hone in a bit of the perceived areas of need. This may potentially influence the content of support lessons as well as our in-class support timetables.

And there are other, more open questions, giving the learners the chance to absolutely rinse our provision, e.g.

When do learners complete this form?

They complete this during one of our 40-minute additional support slots, although completion is not compulsory. We do this as an activity in school so there is ample opportunity for support, translation and/or concept checking, talking through the options, and gathering verbal feedback on the side too.

We treat the form as a kind of ‘real world’ task and something that they might encounter within other subject areas, so there’s a bit of learner training thrown in there.

Generally speaking, how is the feedback from learners?

Yeah, quite good. A fair amount of responses from the students available. Averages about 4/5 (agree) for most statements. And the open responses sometimes provide useful suggestions, which we summarize and add to our quality assurance tracker for reference/discussion.

Does the student voice survey actually lead to changes/enhancements in EAL provisions?

Yes. Example: feedback on the amount of homework we provide suggested that some learners may want more:

We’ve been looking for ways to make this more consistent/substantial this year. I’ve introduced a self-study tool for SPaG (Quill) so there is always the opportunity to further improve English accuracy at home (with instant feedback on performance). That said, we continue to use most homework time for finishing classwork, which isn’t ideal and something we still need to work on. We did try skills-focused homework last year (reading records for Term 1, Listening practice Term 2, etc), but it wasn’t so effective. We’ll consult the learners in more of a focus group towards the end of term, to ask for their input on appropriate homework tasks.

Anyhow, yes the student voice does feed into our department planning and provision. Most notably, there are sometimes changes to the timetable to accommodate support needed for the learners – especially if they are requesting this in the run up to exams.

What other student feedback is there? Only a survey?

In Term 3 last year I wanted to set up focus groups. I wanted learners to talk with members of the senior leadership team about the EAL provision, rather than the EAL team leading the conversations. Unfortunately, the term got away from us. Hopefully, we can get SLT/student focus groups up and running this term.

Of course there’s also informal feedback from learners during lessons. That can be really useful too!

My recommendations for student voice surveys

Make the student voice a language learning / task training type opportunity, not just a tick box thing.
Do listen and act.
Share findings with SLT. This wasn’t a prerequisite for our department processes, but I think it’s useful to keep leaders informed and aware of the reasons for certain dept changes/decisions.
Don’t bias it. It is really easy (when supporting learners to access the student voice content) to react to student responses in the moment. ‘Oh, you’ve said you disagree with this statement? Why is that?’ Learners might not feel confident in justifying their opinions, so might avoid negative responses if they feel they’ll be forced to justify their views!
If they prefer responding in their home language (or another language) that’s no issue. Honest feedback is the important thing.

Anyhow, our student voice processes are currently at a ‘we have something in place but it’s not optimized’ phase. How do your EAL department gather feedback from learners, and is the feedback useful? Suggestions always welcome!

Image by Adrian from Pixabay