Reform poses looming threat to ESOL we can’t ignore

In May 2025, newly elected Reform Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire Andrea Jenkyns used her victory speech to suggest that migrants should be housed in tents rather than hotels, by saying that “tents are good enough for France, they should be good enough for here in Britain”.

Around a year later, Keir Starmer found time in his short resignation speech to include the closure of “asylum hotels” as one of his key achievements.

Here in Starmer’s constituency of Somers Town and St Pancras, where WM College is located, we see more and more rough sleepers in tents every day, and cases of homelessness among our ESOL learners increase exponentially. So, it seems the Reform Mayor may have got her wish.

ESOL on an app?

And where Reform has real power over the education budgets, Mayor Jenkyns has gone further than mere rhetoric. Greater Lincolnshire will be defunding ESOL from 2027. Justifying her decision, Jenkyns suggested that migrants could learn English using a free app on their phone and that the money would be better spent on the “native” population.

The implicit assumptions here are that ESOL has no benefit beyond what Duolingo can do and that anyone who is benefiting from funded ESOL provision does not deserve our support because they are not “British”. The first point shows a truly shocking level of ignorance as to the nature of ESOL and of language learning in general. The second point is empirically false from a purely definitional standpoint; 35 per cent of people who reported not being able to speak English in the last census were in fact British nationals.

As Nusrat Hathiari argues, we see ever increasingly harsh rhetoric in debates around immigration, integration and language learning and few solutions offered. The current proposals in the government’s immigration paper focus mostly on increasing language requirements for visa applications, to make it harder to settle without already having high English proficiency. There is a brief mention of making access to classes easier for those already here, but still no sign of action on this.

Soaring demand

In the meantime, here at WM College, we watch our ESOL waiting list go up and up with no additional funding to meet the demand.

While the evidence from the latest census overwhelmingly shows that most adult migrants do in fact speak English well or very well (almost 80 per cent), over a decade of funding cuts has severely restricted access to provision of free ESOL classes.  This has likely contributed to the significant and growing minority reporting that they do not speak English well or at all.

The numbers in the last census show that this number is much higher than average in a ward like St Pancras and Somers Town where there is a high ESOL need; 42 per cent of the population is foreign-born and 18 per cent live in a household where nobody has English as their main language. Within the Camden borough overall, 21 per cent of the population reported a language other than English as their main language. While almost 100 different languages were recorded, the most common were French, Bengali, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Portuguese and Somali which combined to make up around half of the total languages recorded.

Multilingualism as an asset

Those Camden residents who reported Bengali, Somali or Arabic as their main language in the Census, were especially likely to report not speaking English well or at all. This is reflected in our internal ESOL data where learners who speak these languages are highly represented in our learner population.  But this data also contains a rich resource, largely ignored: those respondents with a different main language who also speak English well.

A core questions for a new ESOL strategy has to be: how can we better make use of the multilinguistic skills of those in our community, seeing multilingualism as a positive not a deficit to be fixed?

It has long been argued that ESOL provision needs a strategy that better serves the needs of the learners. This is why innovative schemes such as those showcased in the recent Beacon Awards for Excellence in ESOL are so important. Finalists Oldham College showed that an Interpreting course can tap into the multilinguistic skills of ESOL learners and can reap great benefits for the confidence of learners and for employability outcomes. These types of initiatives can be a guiding light for a new ESOL strategy, which views multilingualism as an asset to the community.

While we wait for a new strategy to come, WM College is following in the footsteps of Oldham, with our first community interpreting course planned for 26-27 already recruiting well.