Paper 1: Navigating the blurred lines between principalship and international school governance: leadership and the locus of ownership control

Mark Gibson and Lucy Bailey

UNAVAILABLE

Paper 2: What Motivates A-level Students to Achieve? The Role Played by their General Life Values and Future Expectations

Carol Brown

UNAVAILABLE

Paper 3: An EAL approach to the ITT Core Content Framework

Gosia Sky

The aim of the presentation is to review the Initial Teacher Training Core Content Framework (ITTCCF) (2019) from an EAL perspective to explore to what extent it prepares pre-service teachers to meet the language and literacy needs of EAL learners. Considering that there are currently about 1.5 million pupils in the maintained sector in England learning EAL i.e. 18% of the school population (DfE 2018), mainstream teachers are tasked with understanding and responding to their needs, ensuring that they can realise their full potential and participate in classroom practices. The ITTCCF “defines in detail the minimum entitlement of all trainee teachers” and “sets out the content that ITT providers and their partnerships must draw upon when designing and delivering their ITT programmes” (DfE 2019b). Together with the Early Career Framework (ECF) (DfE 2019a), due to be rolled out to schools from September 2020, as part of a 2-year package to support the professional development of those at the start of their careers, it forms an official, structured foundation for future generations of practitioners (ibid.). While both prioritise integration and inclusion, drawing on the best available evidence to prepare pre-service teachers for their professions, there is sadly no reference to EAL in them, which echoes an equally small reference to it in the Carter Review (2015). Given the growing numbers of EAL learners in the UK, limited knowledge about languages and language variation that pre-service teachers often bring to ITT, and the lack of specific guidance/preparation for teachers as to how to best support EAL pupils in practice (e.g. Foley et al. 2018, Anderson et al. 2016), it is argued that the framework should be updated to address EAL matters, to acknowledge that they deserve to be paid more attention.