More than a fifth of England’s primary pupils speak English as an Additional Language (EAL), yet our educational resources often don’t reflect that. Ana Grilo, Director at First Edition Translations, explores how your venue can support improved accessibility for EAL learners, and enhance your visitor experience for families at the same time.
Picture a Year 4 class visiting a natural history museum. They cluster around a dinosaur skeleton, eyes open wide. A teaching assistant crouches beside a girl at the back. She’s curious, clearly engaged, but the worksheet in her hand is a wall of English she can’t fully navigate. Her family speaks Bengali at home. The wonder is there. The access isn’t.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently. It could be playing out in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester or Bradford – in fact, in almost any city in the UK. And yet, as someone who has spent years working with museums and galleries on multilingual content for foreign visitors, I kept noticing the same gap: the educational resources we hand out to children during school visits are almost exclusively in English.
Across England, more than a fifth of all primary school pupils speak English as an Additional Language. In many of our major cities that figure is considerably higher. More than 300 languages are represented in UK classrooms (Department for Education, National School Census). These children are already visiting our institutions. The question I started asking myself was: are we really meeting them when they arrive?
The visual experience of standing in front of a great object is immediate and universal. The written layer around it should be too.
When I started having this conversation with my contacts in museum learning teams, the response surprised me. The demographic shift wasn’t news to anyone, and many had been thinking about it for a while. What was missing wasn’t awareness. It was a practical first step that felt manageable without a large budget or a major operational change.
So, we began exploring what a genuinely small-scale pilot might look like. Not a sweeping translation programme – just a handful of high-traffic KS resources, translated into three to five of the most widely spoken community languages, delivered as digital downloads and tracked to see what happened. Bengali, Urdu, Polish, Arabic, Punjabi and Somali are consistently among the most common EAL languages nationally, but the right choice varies by location; a gallery in Bradford will have different priorities to one in Bristol or Edinburgh, and visitor data is the best guide.
It isn’t a question of whether to do something – it is a question of which resources to start with.
One thing I’d flag for anyone considering this: the first translation project does more than produce translated materials. It forces you to think carefully about your terminology and the specific words you use consistently across your educational content. Building that shared vocabulary, even informally, means that any future translation work becomes faster and more consistent. It’s an institutional asset that outlasts the pilot itself.
The other thing worth knowing is that tracking uptake – even just counting downloads by language – generates genuinely useful data. It tells you whether demand exists before you commit to anything larger. That evidence is worth having regardless of what comes next.
If you’re thinking about this for your own institution, here’s what I’d suggest:
- Start with your data. Which school groups visit most often, and which languages are most represented in those schools? Your local authority or school outreach team may already have this.
- Pick resources that already work well in English. The best candidates for translation are the ones teachers already reach for.
- Keep the scope small and the tracking simple. Three resources, three languages, download counts by language. That’s enough to tell you something meaningful.
Extending the Visitor Experience
One thing I didn’t fully anticipate is how naturally these materials extend beyond the school visit. A translated gallery trail created for a KS2 class is, with very little adaptation, a family activity resource. A multilingual worksheet designed to help a ten-year-old engage with an exhibition works just as well for her parents or grandparents who share the same language at home.
For commercial teams, that has a real and practical implication: families who feel genuinely welcomed, who find materials in their own language, who don’t have to work around a barrier that shouldn’t exist, stay longer, engage more deeply, and come back. They bring others. The translated resource stops being a school asset and becomes part of a broader visitor experience offer. That’s not the primary reason to do this, but it’s a meaningful one, and it’s worth factoring into how the investment is framed internally.
The girl with the Bengali-speaking family and the dinosaur worksheet deserves the same depth of engagement as every other child in that room. I don’t think that’s a controversial position. I just think we haven’t yet made it easy enough to act on – and that’s what I’d like to change.
Sources
Department for Education – Schools, pupils and their characteristics (National School Census)
Office for National Statistics – Language in England and Wales, Census 2021
Discover more
First Edition Translations is a Cambridge-based ISO 17100-certified language services provider founded in 1981. Specialising in publishing, museums, cultural heritage and life sciences, First Edition works with institutions including the Royal Collection Trust, the National Gallery, Tate Publishing, the Van Gogh Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. First Edition Translations is as Associate Member of the Association for Cultural Enterprises.
Institutions interested in exploring a multilingual pilot are welcome to get in touch: ana@firstedit.co.uk | firstedit.co.uk
