'It was unknown territory to us' - How an Essex school welcomed refugees - and what it's learned

When a hotel in the Essex village of Birchanger started hosting refugees in 2022, a group of the fathers turned up at the local school one day and asked: "Can our children join?" It was both an easy and a difficult decision for Birchanger Church of England primary school.

- Rachel Hall

The school sees itself as a welcoming space, yet staff feared that, like most schools, they would be left on their own to integrate the new pupils.

The intake of children from Kurdistan, Iran, Colombia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Ukraine and Afghanistan increased the school's population by 12%, shifting it away from a monoculture, with new dietary and religious requirements to factor in.

"It quite quickly changed the dynamic of the school," said the headteacher, Sharon Vessey. "We had to look at the logistics of classrooms. We had to have another teacher to teach them [English]. It was unknown territory to us; we didn't know how they were going to be, what they'd been through."

Birchanger is one of many schools that have been suddenly tasked with supporting new asylum-seeker and refugee pupils with complex needs and found there was limited help.

The school encountered a lack of understanding from the local authority, from which the former headteacher "really battled" to secure funding for an English language teacher, while existing teachers spent an extra hour a day planning, Vessey recalled.