ESOL is evolving, policy and funding must evolve with it

When I started teaching in FE and adult education in the late 1980s, ESOL was often a quiet and improvised part of the system. Classes took place in community centres, church halls and borrowed rooms, supported by skilled teachers working with too little recognition and too few resources. Yet what happened in those rooms was unmistakable: people gained not just grammar, but confidence, independence and a stronger place in the world.

That truth has not changed. What has changed is almost everything around it. ESOL now sits much closer to national debates about immigration, employment, integration and public services. The stakes are higher, the learners’ needs are broader, and the pressure on providers is more acute. The question is no longer whether ESOL matters. It is whether the system has kept pace with what ESOL has become.

Around one million people in England and Wales cannot speak English well or at all, according to the 2021 Census. Yet in 2023-24, only around 170,000 people enrolled on an ESOL course and only a proportion of them were regulated award based qualifications. This is not a small technical gap. It is the distance between what policy increasingly expects of people and what publicly funded provision is able to help them achieve.

That gap has been building for years. ESOL investment has fallen from £247 million in 2010-11 to £186 million in 2023-24 in real terms, a 25 per cent cut at a time of sustained demand. Providers are managing waiting lists, recruitment pressures and funding rules that can push learners towards functional skills English qualifications that were never designed for people learning English as an additional language. Meanwhile, the national curriculum which dates back to 2001, was built for a different era. Its survival-focused model gave the sector important structure, but it no longer fully reflects the lives many learners are living now.

Recent immigration policy has also moved towards higher English language expectations which include demands on work, family life and settlement. The aim is understandable. Most people in the sector would agree that English helps people integrate, work and contribute. But raising expectations without strengthening provision is not a strategy – it’s a contradiction. If English proficiency is treated as a condition of participation then language learning must be treated as essential infrastructure, not an optional add-on.

This is where ESOL is evolving most clearly. For too long, it has been described as if it were mainly about survival English: making an appointment, asking for directions or filling in a form. Those things still matter, but modern ESOL has to reach further because learners’ lives reach further. People need English for work, health, housing, digital services, parenting, further study and community participation. They need to navigate systems that are increasingly online. Above all, they need the confidence to belong, not just the vocabulary to cope.

A contemporary ESOL curriculum should therefore connect English to the real situations learners face in their homes, workplaces and communities. That means building language through meaningful contexts: problem solving, collaboration, digital confidence, employability and civic participation. Practitioners such as Sam Pepper, an external quality assurer at Ascentis and a NATECLA trainer, have argued that approaches such as Fusion Skills, human centric skills all people need to thrive and connect with others in a diverse society, which can help ESOL move beyond a narrow survival model. This would give learners the language, confidence and adaptability they need for life beyond the classroom. It also means recognising learners as adults with experience, skills and ambitions, not simply as people with a language deficit.

Teachers and providers are already moving in this direction. They are designing learning that reflects changing communities, changing workplaces and changing technology. The sector cannot modernise on goodwill alone. Technology can help where it gives learners safe opportunities to practise, especially outside the classroom, but it remains a complement to skilled teaching rather than a replacement for it. What learners need most is high-quality provision, accessible routes through the levels, and enough funded places to meet demand.

The learners in ESOL classrooms are not a policy problem. Many are already working, raising families and caring for others. Many more could contribute further with the right support. If we want stronger communities and a stronger workforce, we need to fund the language learning that makes participation possible.

ESOL is evolving alongside our society. Policy and funding must evolve with it.