By FlashAcademy® CEO Veejay Lingiah (pictured)
Most school group and trust leaders can tell you exactly how SEND is tracked across their organisation. Far fewer can answer the same question about multilingual learners. As school systems scale, leadership responsibility is shifting from individual schools to building capability across entire networks. The number of state schools in England joining a multi-academy trust has risen from 28% in 2019 to over 44% today. Internationally, 38% of schools now belong to a school group, and that model continues to grow.
Yet while safeguarding, SEND and attainment all have established infrastructure, multilingual learners are often the exception. Provision has typically grown organically within individual schools, creating pockets of excellent practice but also fragmentation. Different schools define multilingual learners differently, track progress against inconsistent frameworks and hold data locally rather than at a group level.
The result is a visibility gap at leadership level. Trust and group leaders often cannot see how multilingual learners are progressing, which schools are achieving the strongest outcomes or where additional support would make the greatest difference. Over time this becomes a leadership risk, limiting the ability to scale effective practice or demonstrate impact to governors and inspectors.
Across the school groups and trusts we work with, multilingual provision tends to evolve through three stages: local intervention, where support sits with individual staff and visibility is limited; coordinated provision, where schools share frameworks but insight remains fragmented; and strategic capability, where leadership teams have genuine, consistent visibility across every school and can direct resources accordingly.
Moving to that third stage requires deliberate decisions from leadership. Organisations that succeed tend to share three things: a common identification framework, consistent progress tracking and trusted, visible data. None of this means replacing what individual schools have already built. It means connecting existing good practice to a shared system that makes it visible, replicable and scalable.
Read the full piece on the FlashAcademy® blog: https://bit.ly/4wxnFu4
FlashAcademy® is a digital multilingual learner platform for UK and international, supporting learners from first assessment to confident English fluency.
Written by Veejay Lingiah, CEO of FlashAcademy®
