Because it’s so important to fully engage all members of your school community throughout everything you do, there are lots of resources to make sure that EAL (English as an Additional Language) students and their families feel an integral and valued part of the day to day life of your school.

That’s why we added a custom integration of Google Translate into the Schudio School Website CMS. It has since become a key feature for many schools around the country.

Google Translate is so much better than it used to be, it was horrendous at one point! It’s now pretty good and while it likely won’t be as good as a hand written translation by an expert translator it is widely accepted as a good tool to use. Of course you could create pages on your site that have a robust translation in place, the difficulty is keeping content that is regularly updated translated, something that becomes a mammoth task almost immediately.

So, there’s a few options available to you, all of which are possible using the Schudio School Website CMS.

1/ Manually Translate for EAL Families

If you do decide to manually translate, why not stick to a particular area of your site? This is a good way to getting the content bang on without having to make sure your news, events etc are translated regularly.

This is a bit unreliable and maybe still excludes certain communities from the full life of your school because they can’t access everything.

2/ Google Translate – Custom Integration

In the Schudio School Website CMS we’ve done an enhanced installation so that you can select languages that are relevant to your specific school community. It’s really easy for you to set up but we will do it for you as part of our standard set up process with no additional cost.

The benefits are that every part of your website will be translated and translated pretty well. The downside is that the translations aren’t always perfect.

Other Ideas to engage EAL Families

What about other ways to engage your EAL families through your website? Well there’s lots of resources online and some great ideas of things that you can do! Here’s a few links and ideas …

British Council – the British Council website has some great resources for both students and parents to help them get engaged in local community life more fully and is a rich resource. It would be a great thing to create a page of resources on your website that you link to and will knock OFSTED’s socks off.

EAL Teaching Strategies – on this site there’s some great resources that you can utilise in school and on your website to provide additional support to students and families.

Write Some Content for EAL Families – have a look at this page: http://www.st-sidwells-ce.devon.sch.uk/parents/information-for-eal-parents. While it’s quite wordy, the idea is great and offers an honest, open and warm welcoming message to families.

There are also some really good, positive articles in certain sections of the press that highlight some of the great work being done in certain schools, something that is worth learning from. Have a read of this article on The Guardian.

Our favourite quote from the article … “”Good teaching is good teaching, whether EAL or not.” The same is true of your website. Do everything you can to make sure you cater for your entire school community online.