EMTAS Moodle

This blog is about a collaboration between Olha, an EMTAS Bilingual ELSA (B-ELSA) and Hannah, one of two school-based ELSAs at Fairview School. Working together, they provided emotional literacy support to Yehor, a child from Ukraine, when he was in Year 2 and again when he was in Year 3. In January 2025, EMTAS Team Leader Sarah Coles visited the school with Olha to talk to Yehor about his experience of that support.

Children from Ukraine in Hampshire schools

Most of Hampshire’s Ukrainian children came to the UK under the ‘Homes for Ukraine’ scheme following Russia’s full-scale invasion of their homeland in February 2022. As we’ve got to know them, we’ve learned they are linguists, mathematicians, musicians, physicists, dancers, artists, gymnasts, chess players and poets. And they are children who’ve been impacted by war, bringing with them experiences the like of which no child should have to endure. Some have had direct experience of the bombing raids, losing people, pets, homes and possessions that way; others have relatives and friends in the worst-affected regions of Ukraine and know about the impacts of the war through the experiences of those people; many continue to live apart from their male relatives who have stayed behind and are involved in the fighting, leading for some to further loss of loved ones as the war drags on. In short, it is not difficult to understand that some of our Ukrainian children may have a need for extra support as they learn to live with grief, separation and losses big and small - these experiences on top of the stress of getting used to living in a new country and a new language. Hence the creation of the B-ELSA role, one way in which Hampshire has responded to the support needs of children from Ukraine.

The B-ELSA role

EMTAS Ukrainian and Russian-speaking Bilingual Assistants have been ELSA-trained by Hampshire Educational Psychology (HEP) and they continue to receive the same supervision from HEP as school-based ELSAs. They are deployed to partner up with school ELSAs to plan and deliver ELSA sessions to children from Ukraine. Because of this collaborative approach, the child can access their ELSA sessions using any or all of their languages. While the B-ELSA moves from school to school throughout the working week, the school ELSA stays put. This ensures that the child has someone they can go to who understands their situation and is there for them all the time; they don’t have to wait for the next B-ELSA visit to get support. What the B-ELSA brings to the sessions is two-fold, both language and culture. Thus the B-ELSA can be a link with home for the child, bridging gaps between home and school in ways in which their school-based colleague cannot.  

The school

Fairview School in south-west Hampshire is a one form entry primary school with around 240 children on roll. Most of the children are English-speaking and numbers of learners for whom English is an Additional Language are low at around 5%. The arrival of children from Ukraine has been a learning curve for everyone at Fairview, but people have been open to taking on this challenge and responding in ways that nurture a sense of belonging; the Ukrainian children are seen as bona fide members of this school’s community.

Meet Yehor 

After the initial shock of joining the school in Year R, his first experience of being in an all-English environment, Yehor seems to settle in well. He tells me he is the youngest of three children and he talks about his dad, Stefan, and an uncle and aunt; these are the people in his family unit. Yehor likes Minecraft and stories. He plays football and he is partial to a custard cream. He doesn’t seem like a child who’s heard bombs falling on his home city, Kiev, or sat for hours in bomb shelters, waiting for the all-clear.

Yehor’s mother died when he was a baby so Stefan is parenting on his own alongside holding down a full-time job. The older siblings help out, collecting Yehor from school. Yehor says they sometimes call him the baby of the family; he doesn’t much like this.

Stefan is keen that his children maintain their language and culture and so when Yehor gets home, there is Ukrainian school work to be done too. Yehor is proud to be Ukrainian and keen to do well. He says

At Fairview, all is well until Year 2. By this time, Yehor is 7 and he’s been here two years. His English is developing well and he is able to access the learning, and is especially keen on maths. However, he begins to demonstrate some behaviours that tell staff he needs a different kind of support. When things don’t go his way, Yehor throws or breaks things, bangs his head on the table or retreats under it. If another child has something he wants, Yehor snatches it. If they get in his way, he roughly pushes them aside.

It is the school’s Head and Deputy who first suggest trying B-ELSA support, having heard about it at a district Head Teachers’ meeting. The school SENDCo agrees; she understands that these new behaviours might be Yehor’s attempt to communicate that he is struggling to navigate the bumpy terrain of living two very different lives, each with its own set of demands and expectations. One he lives at school in English and the other at home in Ukrainian – two different languages, two different cultures; small wonder he’s experiencing difficulties finding his way aged just 7 and with no route map to help him.

The B-ELSA-supported sessions 

EMTAS B-ELSA Olha is the person in this story whose job it is to help Yehor build his own bridge so that he can navigate life in two languages and manage the emotional side of that experience. In her B-ELSA role, Olha says she sees herself as a facilitator, letting the school-based ELSA lead the sessions, ready to step in if a child seems hesitant, or if she sees there’s been a misunderstanding. School-based ELSA Hannah’s job is to provide continuity and to be the person who is there for Yehor every day, noticing when he’s coped well with a tricky situation and offering him an encouraging word, and feeding her day-to-day observations of him into session planning.   

The two aims of Yehor’s B-ELSA-supported sessions are 1) to work on Yehor’s social skills and 2) to help him understand and name his own emotions – a vital step towards managing them for himself in more positive ways. In line with best practice for this way of working, at the start of each of Olha’s visits, and before Yehor joins them, Hannah briefs Olha on what’s been going on for Yehor between times. At the end, when Yehor’s gone back to class, they spend another few minutes reflecting on how the session went and planning for the next one.

After the second series of sessions in the autumn term of Yehor’s Year 3, the situation is much improved. Yehor is able to use lots of new words to talk about emotions – his own and those of others. He can identify when he is feeling angry and he describes ‘hot chocolate breathing’ as a strategy he’s learned in his B-ELSA-supported sessions and uses to calm himself down.

Yehor says the best part of his B-ELSA supported sessions has been the stories; he’s loved having Olha read to him in Ukrainian at the end. This has for Yehor been an affirmation of his Ukrainian identify, a link with his home language and his home country. It’s also been an opportunity for him to explore a new role, that of interpreter; he tells Hannah in English what the story’s about as they go, and he’s become really good at it, both Hannah and Olha affirm. Thus his sense of his own identity has been boosted and he has learned to accept praise where he’s achieved success, here as a young interpreter.

When asked if he’d recommend B-ELSA-supported sessions to other children from Ukraine, Yehor says “definitely,” adding that the sessions “…helped me a lot…to talk about how I’m feeling.” Now, when asked about school in England, Yehor tells me, “whole entire class is my friends.” He goes on, “I have to do everything correctly, listen, be good, be kind,” and he knows some ways to show those behaviours now, thanks to the sessions he’s had. And so we leave Yehor, a happy, settled, talkative boy who is now able to more fully enjoy the experience of growing up in more than one language.

___________________________________________________
For more information about children here as refugees, for free resources and for specific information about accessing B-ELSA support for a child from Ukraine, see the EMTAS Moodle Course: Asylum Seeker & Refugee Support.