Does my child need EAL support? Signs parents notice first

Parents almost never come to me because of a test score. They come because of something much smaller: a child who talks all through dinner and says nothing in class. Homework that takes three hours and should take one. A shrug when you ask what happened at school.

None of those means anything on its own. All of them together, over a few weeks, is worth a conversation.

The gap that catches families out

Conversational English arrives fast. A child can be fluent at the dinner table, funny with friends, completely at ease — and still be working much harder than anyone realises to follow a science lesson.

Academic English is a different thing: the vocabulary of a subject, the sentence shapes textbooks use, the ability to write an argument rather than an answer. It takes years longer. That gap is normal. It is also exactly where support does the most good, and it is invisible to anyone judging by how well a child chats.

What I would actually watch for

A child who copies more than they compose. Written work that reads far simpler than how they speak. Reading homework avoided specifically, while everything else gets done. Answers that used to be volunteered and now are not.

Teachers usually see this too. It is worth asking them directly what they have noticed, in those words — most will have an answer ready that nobody has asked them for.

And what a good response looks like

It starts with an actual assessment rather than a guess, so support aims at the real gap instead of a general sense that things are hard. After that, the best support is mostly invisible: vocabulary pre-taught before the lesson that needs it, a writing task scaffolded so the thinking is still the child's, a teacher who knows which part of a task is testing English and which part is testing history.

One thing worth saying to your child

For my master's thesis I interviewed administrators, teachers, students and parents about the languages children bring into international schools. The clearest finding, and the one I still think about: those languages are a resource, not a problem.

A child who thinks in two languages is not behind a monolingual child. They are doing something harder. It helps enormously when the adults around them say so out loud.

If this sounds like your family, a proper assessment is a better next step than waiting to see. I do placement assessment for schools and one-to-one tutoring for students who need focused support outside the classroom.