Ethnic minority service

The Ethnic Minority Service are a pool of bilingual assistants. We specialise in children to which English is as an additional language. We work in a range of settings such as, pre-school, primary and secondary schools. We speak 21 different languages and currently support around half of the schools throughout Southampton.

What languages do you support?

We can support any language that the child may speak.

We do this by using our own specially designed assessments and strategies (which are differentiated by levels) to help these children; this works even if the bi-lingual assistant cannot speak the language. However we do have many English as an additional language speakers within our service and we will try and and match the languages where possible, we can also use the following languages we know to aid with translations or creation of visual information for the child.

• Arabic
• Bengali
• Cantonese
• Dari
• Dutch
• Farsi
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Korean
• Kutchi
• Malayalam
• Mandarin
• Portuguese
• Punjabi
• Polish
• Russian
• Spanish
• Telegu
• Thai
• Urdu

How do I contact a bilingual assistant?

Services from the Ethnic Minority Service can be brought for a minimal charge by contacting our team manager or an ethnic minority co-ordinator.

What can the Ethnic Minority Service do?

Support is provided in many different ways and aspects, through group interventions, first language assessments, feedback about the child’s understanding, and support through SATs, GCSEs, Annual Reviews and parents meetings. As well as giving language taster sessions and cultural diversity assemblies.

We also support the parents in the home school links such as at parent’s evenings and to support them in understanding their child’s curriculum.

Finally we are able to give training through Inspire to help you develop your own procedures in dealing with new and current students with English as an additional language, and develop your own ethnic minority co-ordinator.