Nursery Tested EAL Support: 5 Admission Questions UK Nurseries Use

Effective EAL support in nursery is built into everyday play and routines, not delivered as separate lessons. Key tactics include visual timetables and props, a consistent key person, and genuine partnership with families around home languages. The Department for Education and the Bell Foundation both back this embedded approach, and it works within the EYFS framework practitioners already follow.

---

TL;DR:

• Most effective EAL support is embedded in daily routines and play, using visual timetables, props, and consistent key persons rather than separate lessons.
• Maintaining a child’s home language supports their overall development, and EAL is not a sign of special needs, but a common linguistic background.
• Early conversations with families should gather information about home languages, understanding, preferred words, and pronunciation before full sessions begin.
• Classroom strategies like using visual cues, repeating phrases, and role play help develop English skills without relying on formal language instruction.
• EAL children are not automatically eligible for extra funding; support should be integrated into normal inclusive practices, with funding considered separately if needed.

---

Table of Contents

• Why multilingualism is an asset, not a problem to solve
• What to ask families when a child starts
• Everyday classroom strategies that make English click
• Settling in without relying on words the child doesn’t have yet
• Tracking progress with the Bell Foundation framework, and knowing when it’s not EAL
• Resources worth having on hand
• Funding and policy: what the EYFS actually requires
• Activities that don’t depend on English at all
• What this looks like in practice at a nursery setting
• Why inclusive practice this way benefits every child, not just EAL learners
• Where Thesunflowernursery fits into your EAL planning
• Sources
• FAQ

Why multilingualism is an asset, not a problem to solve

Speaking more than one language is a strength, and Department for Education guidance is explicit that maintaining a home language supports rather than delays English acquisition. Nurseries that treat EAL as something to fix, rather than something to build on, tend to underestimate what a child can already do.

The Bell Foundation’s guidance on EAL in early years settings sets out five principles worth pinning to a staffroom wall:

• Multilingualism is an asset to be nurtured, not a barrier to remove
• High expectations paired with the right level of support
• Language and content taught together, never in isolation
• Assessment that looks at the whole child, across languages
• Genuine social inclusion, not separate “EAL time”

Cognitively, children juggling two or more languages often develop stronger flexibility in switching between tasks and rules, a side effect of constantly managing which language to use with whom. Socially, they usually settle faster into a peer group when their home language is welcomed rather than sidelined.

One distinction matters more than any other: EAL is not SEND. A child who understands very little English but responds fluently and appropriately in Urdu, Portuguese, or Lithuanian is showing typical development, not a language delay. Confusing the two leads to unnecessary referrals and, just as often, to missed genuine needs. More on that later.

What to ask families when a child starts

The first conversation with a family shapes everything that follows, and it needs to happen before the child’s first full session, not weeks into settling in. A short admission conversation, done well, tells you far more than a form filled in alone in a corridor.

Ask for, and record, these details:

1. Which language(s) the child hears and speaks at home, and with whom (a child might speak Punjabi with a grandparent and English with an older sibling).
2. What the child understands, even if they don’t yet speak it back — the Bell Foundation notes that receptive understanding and spoken output can be months apart, and treating silence as lack of comprehension is a common error.
3. Favourite words for daily routines — their word for “toilet,” “milk,” or “tired,” so staff can bridge the gap in the first few days rather than guessing.
4. Favourite songs, rhymes, and stories from home, which give you an instant, low-pressure way to include the child’s language in group time.
5. Correct pronunciation of the child’s name, checked directly with the family rather than assumed from spelling.

Where a family’s English is limited, use a professional interpreter for anything beyond a quick chat, and provide key documents such as welcome packs or policy summaries in translation. Google Translate on a phone screen is fine for a quick reassurance during drop-off; it is not fine for consent forms or safeguarding information.

Pro Tip: Ask parents to record a thirty-second voice note of themselves saying five key routine words in their home language. Play it back to yourself before the child’s first session so you’re not learning pronunciation live in front of them.

Invite families to bring in a favourite book, a family photo for the child’s peg, or teach the group a simple greeting. Small gestures like this signal that the home language belongs in the nursery, not just at home.

Everyday classroom strategies that make English click

None of this needs a specialist qualification. It needs consistency, and it needs staff to resist the urge to over-question a child who is still working out what English sounds like.

DfE guidance on supporting EAL in early years settings recommends commenting and labelling rather than firing questions at a child who cannot yet answer them. “You’ve got the red car” does more work than “What colour is that?” because it models language without demanding a response the child may not be ready to give.

A few techniques practitioners can use from tomorrow morning:

• Say less, stress, go slow. Shorten your sentences, stress the key word, and slow your pace, rather than repeating the same long sentence louder.
• Show, don’t just tell. Pair every instruction with a gesture, object, or photograph. “Coats on” means little without a coat in your hand or pointing at the peg.
• Repeat useful phrases across the day. Hearing “washing hands” at the sink every single day builds recognition faster than hearing it once in a circle-time discussion.
• Use visual timetables with photographs of your own room and your own children, not generic stock icons, so the images map onto the child’s actual experience.
• Layer participation. A child can join in a song by clapping the rhythm before they can sing a single word, and that counts as participation, not passive presence.

Ladder-step your expectations rather than aiming for full sentences on day one. A realistic progression looks like: physical response (pointing, following an action) → single words → short phrases → full sentences. Planning for the first rung rather than the last one prevents the frustration that comes from constantly asking for more than a child can currently give.

Role play areas are particularly useful because they let a child rehearse language in a low-stakes, repeatable context. A home corner with familiar objects, a small world set with figures resembling the child’s own family, or a shop with real packaging from home all give language a job to do rather than asking the child to produce it for its own sake.

NALDIC’s guidance makes an important point that runs against instinct: withdrawing a child from play to give them one-to-one English practice can slow progress rather than speed it. Children often pick up language from peers just as readily as from adults, sometimes more so, because peer interaction happens on the child’s own terms and at their own pace.

Settling in without relying on words the child doesn’t have yet

A confident settling-in plan does most of its work before a single formal assessment happens. Predictability is the currency here: a child who cannot yet follow spoken instructions can still follow a routine they’ve seen repeated enough times to anticipate.

A workable settling-in timeline for a new EAL starter looks like this:

1. Pre-visit with family present, where the key person is introduced by name and photo, ideally sent home in advance.
2. First short sessions with a parent nearby, focused purely on the child associating the room, the key person, and a few familiar objects with safety.
3. Gradual extension of time alone, guided by the child’s body language and engagement, not a fixed calendar.
4. Introduction of a personalised routine book — photographs of the child’s own coat peg, their own lunch table, their own toilet, arranged in sequence, so the day becomes visually predictable.
5. Small, specific targets set within the first two weeks, such as “follows the visual cue for snack time without adult prompting” rather than a vague aim like “settles well.”

The key person carries the bulk of this. Their job is to build the one relationship the child can rely on while everything else, language included, is unfamiliar. Reviewing targets doesn’t need a separate assessment slot; it happens through the observations you’re already making during normal continuous provision.

Tracking progress with the Bell Foundation framework, and knowing when it’s not EAL

Assessment for an EAL child in nursery works best as observation woven into the day, not a formal test pulled out of a drawer. Watch for five things during ordinary play: what the child listens to and responds to, what they understand, how they communicate (verbally or otherwise), how they play alongside or with others, and how they interact with peers specifically.

The Bell Foundation’s EAL Assessment Framework and digital tracker is free and built primarily for school-age pupils, but it can be adapted for EYFS use. The Foundation itself advises applying professional judgement here, since not every descriptor in the framework maps neatly onto a three or four-year-old’s development. Use it as a structure for recording what you observe, not a rigid checklist to tick against a toddler.

Signs worth flagging for further assessment, ideally involving the family and, where possible, someone who speaks the child’s home language:

• Difficulties that show up across every language the child uses, not just English
• No progress in communication, gesture, or play interaction over an extended period, despite consistent support
• Regression in skills the child previously demonstrated, in any language

Context matters here. The Bell Foundation’s 2023 analysis recorded 1.68 million pupils, 20.5% of the school population in England, as using EAL. That figure is drawn from the school census and doesn’t tell you how many nursery-aged children fall into the same category. It’s useful context for scale, not a number to quote as a nursery statistic.

Confirming competence in the home language with parents before raising a SEND concern is the single most useful safeguard against misdiagnosis, as the Bell Foundation’s guidance on SEND and EAL makes clear.

Resources worth having on hand

You don’t need an unlimited budget to build a genuinely welcoming, language-rich room. A handful of free and low-cost resources cover most of what a nursery actually needs.

• Bell Foundation downloads for assessment structure and EYFS-adapted guidance, all free to access
• British Council’s Learn English Kids materials for simple songs, stories, and printable flashcards
• Local authority EAL packs, which often include translated key phrases and setting-specific guidance for your region
• Home-made photo books, built from your own classroom and your own children, which outperform generic commercial resources for familiarity
• Simple story audio recordings, made with written parental consent, giving a child access to a familiar story voiced in their home language during quiet time

For ready-made play resources that support this kind of activity-based learning, providers such as Nurture Neuroscience offer connected play products designed to build early language and sensory engagement, which can sit alongside your own homemade materials rather than replace them.

Funding and policy: what the EYFS actually requires

The EYFS statutory framework requires providers to plan for inclusive practice and to track every child’s progress, EAL or otherwise, against the seven areas of learning. It does not set out a separate EAL curriculum; the expectation is that ordinary provision is adapted to be accessible, which is precisely the embedded approach this guide has been describing throughout.

The funding picture trips up a lot of settings, so it’s worth being precise: EAL status alone does not automatically trigger extra funding. Early years funding is routed through local authorities, and rates and any supplementary support depend on local arrangements rather than a national EAL payment. A child needing additional language support might attract funding through inclusion or SEND routes if criteria are met locally, but that’s a separate process from simply flagging EAL on a registration form.

Practically, this means:

• Check your local authority’s own funding guidance for the 2026 to 2027 year rather than assuming a blanket EAL allowance exists
• Keep EAL support and any SEND-related funding conversation entirely separate, since conflating the two risks both misdiagnosis and a wasted funding application
• Budget EAL provision as part of ordinary inclusive practice, staff training and resources, rather than banking on external funding to cover it

Understanding local entitlement rules matters just as much for parent communication as it does for setting budgets.

Activities that don’t depend on English at all

Some of the strongest EAL provision doesn’t look like language teaching at all. It looks like good early years practice that happens to work regardless of which language a child arrives speaking.

1. Sensory play (water trays, sand, dough) gives every child, whatever their English level, an equal footing to explore, experiment, and be observed doing so.
2. Role play with real props from home lets a child rehearse familiar scripts, a shop till, a tea set, a doctor’s bag, in a context where the actions carry meaning even before the words do.
3. Photo-story books built from the child’s own experiences let them “read” a familiar narrative aloud, in whichever language comes naturally, building confidence before English vocabulary catches up.
4. Call-and-response songs, repeated across several sessions, let a child join in with sound and rhythm long before they can produce the actual words.

Revisit the same core vocabulary across several sessions rather than introducing new words constantly; repetition across contexts, snack time, outdoor play, tidy-up time, is what actually embeds new words. Observable outcomes worth recording include joining in with a repeated action, using a single word appropriately in context, or initiating play with a peer without adult prompting.

What this looks like in practice at a nursery setting

In nursery practice, admission conversations gather language history alongside the usual settling-in details: which languages a child hears at home, their preferred words for toilet, food and comfort, and any songs or stories the family wants brought into the room. This isn’t paperwork for its own sake; it’s the information a key person needs on day one.

A typical settling-in vignette looks like this: a two-year-old starting with very little spoken English is given a small photo book of her own peg, her own snack table, and her key person’s face built before her first full session. Her target for week two is simple and observable, following the visual cue for tidy-up time without an adult prompt, reviewed through normal daily observation rather than a formal test. Parents are asked weekly, informally, what new words she’s using at home, which often reveals progress the nursery day alone wouldn’t show.

Related reading from the nursery’s own practitioners covers:

• Bilingual support in nurseries: a parent’s guide
• Nursery transition guide for Ilford and Redbridge parents
• SEND support in nurseries: a parent’s guide to inclusion

Why inclusive practice this way benefits every child, not just EAL learners

Personal, social and emotional development sits underneath every language gain a child makes. A child who feels safe with their key person and confident in the room’s routines will find language easier to risk using, whatever that language is. That’s not a soft add-on to EAL practice; it’s the actual mechanism it runs on.

None of this needs perfect execution. A nursery that consistently comments rather than questions, keeps routines visually predictable, and treats a family’s home language as an asset will get most of the way there, even without a full-time EAL specialist on staff. Pick one change from this guide, the photo routine book, the “say less, stress, go slow” habit, the admission language-history conversation, and try it this week rather than waiting for a training day to give you permission.

— tariq

Where Thesunflowernursery fits into your EAL planning

Thesunflowernursery isn’t a training provider selling you a course. It’s a working EYFS setting in Ilford and South Woodford applying exactly the practices covered here: key-person settling sessions, visual routines, and genuine family partnership around home languages, day in and day out with real children.

If you’re a parent weighing up a nursery place for a child who speaks another language at home, our settling-in process is built around the admission conversation described above, gathering language history, favourite words, and family input before your child’s first full session, so the transition doesn’t rely on English they haven’t got yet. If you’re a nursery leader looking to build your own team’s confidence with EAL practice, our half day and free sessions give you a low-pressure way to see this approach in action before committing further.

Registration for a place carries a one-off £50 registration fee, and full details of our policies, including our approach to inclusion, are set out on our parents’ information pages. Book a visit through our main childcare page to see a settling-in session for yourself.

Sources

• Help for early years providers : English as an additional language (EAL)
• Gov
• NALDIC guidance: supporting children learning English as an additional language

FAQ

What is the current policy on EAL education in the UK?

There’s no separate EAL curriculum in England; the EYFS statutory framework requires providers to plan inclusive practice that supports every child’s progress across the seven areas of learning, EAL included. DfE guidance directs practitioners to embed language support in play and routines rather than delivering it as isolated lessons.

Do nurseries get extra funding for EAL children?

No, not automatically. Early years funding is routed through local authorities, and EAL status alone doesn’t trigger a national supplementary payment; any extra support funding depends on your specific local authority’s own criteria and processes.

How many children in the UK are EAL?

There’s no single published nursery-age figure. For school-age context, the Bell Foundation recorded 1.68 million pupils, 20.5% of the school population in England in 2023, using EAL, but that’s drawn from the school census and shouldn’t be treated as a nursery-specific statistic.

What does EAL mean in a UK nursery or school setting?

EAL stands for English as an Additional Language, describing a child whose first or home language isn’t English. It’s a description of linguistic background, not a special educational need, and the Bell Foundation is explicit that EAL should never be assumed to indicate a language disorder or SEND on its own.

Does Thesunflowernursery support children learning English as an additional language?

Yes. Thesunflowernursery builds EAL support into its settling-in process, key-person approach and everyday EYFS practice across its Ilford and South Woodford settings, gathering language history from families at admission and using visual routines throughout the day.

Recommended

• SEND support in nurseries: A parent’s guide to inclusion
• Understanding nursery policies in East London for 2026
• Nursery applications in East London: your 2026 guide
• Nursery transition guide for Ilford and Redbridge parents

In other news