Creating an Inclusive Community

It’s recruitment season!

Exciting when you get lots of fantastic applicants that you know will add tremendous value to your school as they bring their educational expertise, passion and dedication to supporting the students in their care.

With recruitment comes pressure too, and from experience, I know that international teacher recruitment can come with some real challenges, particularly as you very rarely get to see a candidate teach or interact with students before you are making them a job offer. And I’ve also found from experience - most people can talk a good game when it comes to teaching at the interview stage, but this doesn’t always translate 100% of the time into day-today classroom practice, and ultimately, the proof of what people say they do is in the pudding (or rather, progress results and student voice!).

So, what can we do to ensure that the decisions that we make now help us to meet our inclusive whole school aims, rather than getting halfway through Term 1 next year and needing to tackle the various issues that arise from onboarding teachers with different values and attitudes than what we are looking to foster within our school?

Things to consider:

1. Be super transparent at the interview stage about your EAL/inclusion policy. For some teachers who have the ingrained, non-inclusive belief that EAL students should become proficient in English before joining an English-speaking mainstream classroom, this will be enough for them to think twice about whether your school is the right one for them.

2. Ensure that your website and social media presence are reflecting this inclusive message too.

3. Make sure you ask the right questions that ensure that you can drill down on the inclusive values, beliefs and skill sets of prospective teachers (I’ve included a list of these below).

4. Share some examples of the excellent inclusive practice that goes on already at your school and seek the opinion of prospective new teachers, for example if you use a class profile tool such as a “Who’s in my class?” profile, to ensure all teachers know the needs of all students that they teach, show them/explain this practice and elicit their response to using a diagnostic differentiation tool such as this.

5. Often it’s better, if you can, to train, nurture and develop your own in-house leaders of EAL so that they can lead the type of provision that reflects your inclusive whole school aims and values. (And if you’re struggling for staff to do the training and nurturing of these leaders, this is something I can help with).

Below are some resources I've collated to support you/save you some time whilst recruiting:

1) Example interview questions to assess candidates’ core beliefs around differentiation and inclusion:

• How do you tailor your lessons to support the different English language needs in your classroom?

• Can you give an example of a time when you have had a student who is new to English or early acquisition, how did you ensure they made good progress in your subject?

• Scenario: you’ve got an iGCSE class and on their mock exams you realise that approximately 25% of students are missing easy marks due to lack of comprehension around academic language and command words. How do you address this in your differentiation in the lead up to exams?

2) I talk about inclusive recruitment in a recent LI which you can access here.

3) EAL coordinator job description

I hope I'm able to save you some time with some of these resources. If you'd like to bounce some ideas around regarding development of your inclusion team next year, send me an email: anna@ealinclusive.com