In short. Every school will tell you it supports children with additional needs. That sentence is worthless until you make it specific. Ask how many qualified learning-support staff there are, how support is actually delivered, whether it costs extra, how many pupils receive it now, and what the EAL programme looks like week to week. The answers separate real provision from a warm phrase in a prospectus.
A mother wrote to us last winter about her son. Eleven years old, bright, funny, diagnosed with dyslexia at eight, and about to start at a well-known boarding school in the West Country. On the open day she had asked whether they supported children like him. “Absolutely,” the registrar said. “We support all learners.” She signed. By half-term he was hiding his prep in his bag rather than admit he could not finish it. The support turned out to be one part-time teacher for the whole school, seen in a group of six, on the two afternoons she could manage.
Nothing the school said was a lie. It was just empty. And “we support all learners” is the emptiest sentence in the boarding market. It costs nothing to say and commits the school to nothing. Your job as a parent is to refuse it politely and ask the questions underneath.
First, know which thing you are asking about
Two needs get folded together in conversation and they are not the same.
EAL is English as an additional language. Your child’s mind works perfectly well. They simply do not yet have the English to show it. A ten-year-old who is fluent in Mandarin and reads above her age in Chinese is not behind. She needs the language, and then she flies.
SEN is special educational needs: dyslexia, ADHD, autism spectrum conditions, and others. This is about how a child learns, not which language they learn in. A dyslexic child who has spoken English since birth still needs specific teaching to read and write with confidence.
The reason this distinction matters is that the provision is completely different, and schools that are strong on one are often weak on the other. An international school with a slick EAL department may have almost nothing for dyslexia. A traditional English prep school with a good learning-support unit may have never run a structured EAL programme in its life. If your child needs both, and many do, you are asking two separate sets of questions, not one. And they interact: a dyslexic child learning in a second language is not the sum of two problems but a harder, tangled one, so ask how the school handles the overlap, not just each need alone.
Say which you mean. Then ask for specifics on each.
Who actually delivers the support?
Start with people, because everything else rests on them.
Ask how many members of staff are qualified in learning support, and what their qualifications are. There is a real difference between a teacher with a recognised specialist diploma and a kind classroom assistant who has been handed the role. Both matter. They are not the same thing, and a school that blurs them is telling you something.
Then ask the ratio. How many pupils in the school currently receive learning support, and how many specialist staff serve them? A school with one part-time specialist and forty children on the register is stretched however warm the language. You do not need a perfect number. You need to know whether the arithmetic is plausible.
For EAL, ask the same in its own terms. Is there a dedicated EAL teacher, or does it fall to whoever has a free period? A school serious about EAL has staff whose actual job it is.
How is the support delivered, exactly?
This is where prospectus language dissolves on contact.
There are two broad models. In-class support, where a specialist works alongside your child during ordinary lessons. And withdrawal, where your child leaves the lesson for focused sessions elsewhere. Most good schools use both, matched to the child. What you want to hear is a school that can explain when it uses which, and why. A school that cannot describe the mechanism probably does not have much of one.
Ask whether support is one-to-one or in a group, and how big the groups are. One-to-one twice a week is a serious commitment. A group of eight, once a week, is supervision, not teaching. Neither is wrong in principle. You need to know which your child would actually get.
For EAL, press hardest here, because this is where “we support all learners” does the most damage. Ask to see the EAL timetable. A real programme has scheduled lessons, a sequence, a way of measuring progress, and a plan for moving a child from beginner English into the mainstream. The alternative is what teachers privately call sink-or-swim: the child is placed in normal lessons and left to absorb English by osmosis while quietly falling behind in every subject at once. Some children do swim. Plenty sink, and lose a year of learning while everyone waits to see. If the school cannot show you a weekly EAL structure, assume it is the pool.
Does it cost extra, and how much?
Ask this plainly and early, because the answer shapes the real fee.
Many schools charge for learning support on top of tuition, often per session or per term, and it can run to a meaningful sum across a year. That may be entirely fair. Specialist teaching is expensive to provide. But you need the number written down before you commit, not discovered on the first bill. Ask what is included in the fees, what is charged separately, and what a typical termly cost looks like for a child with your child’s profile. A straight answer here is itself a good sign. Evasion is a bad one.
How does the school tell a real need from a young or unsettled child?
This is the question almost no parent asks, and it may be the most revealing.
A child who has just moved continents, left their friends, and started boarding for the first time will struggle for a while. That is not a special educational need. It is being eleven and a long way from home. A good school knows the difference and does not medicalise ordinary homesickness. It also does not shrug off a genuine difficulty as “settling in” for a year until it becomes a crisis.
Ask how the school distinguishes the two. Who watches for it, how early, and what happens next. Ask how houseparents and the learning-support team talk to each other, because the pastoral side and the academic side seeing the same child from two angles is exactly how a real need gets caught early. A school with a thoughtful answer has clearly done this before. A school that looks puzzled by the question has told you a great deal.
The honest part: some schools are the wrong place
Here is the opinion this guide is willing to defend. Some of the most admired schools in the country, the fast, academically intense ones with long waiting lists, are the wrong choice for a child who needs support. Not because they are bad. Because they are built for a different child.
A school that moves at pace, sets a heavy prep load, and expects pupils to keep up under their own steam can be a hard place to have dyslexia or ADHD, or to be learning in a second language. The pressure that suits a confident, robust learner can quietly grind down a child who needs more time and more scaffolding. Choosing a gentler, better-resourced school over a famous name is not settling. It is fit. Your child does not need the school with the best reputation. They need the school that will teach the child you actually have.
There is no stigma in this, whatever the market’s instincts. A school that is honest about who it serves well is doing you a favour. The one to worry about is the school that promises it can be all things to every child. It cannot, and neither can any school.
The SEN and EAL questions a school cannot dodge
Take this to every open day and admissions call. Write the answers down. Compare them across schools.
– How many staff are qualified in learning support, and what are their specific qualifications?
– How many pupils currently receive learning support, against how many specialist staff?
– Is support delivered in-class, by withdrawal, or both, and how do you decide which for a given child?
– Is support one-to-one or in groups, and how large are the groups?
– Does learning support cost extra? What is the typical termly cost for a child with my child’s profile?
– For EAL: is there a dedicated EAL teacher, and can I see the weekly EAL timetable?
– For EAL: how do you move a child from beginner English into mainstream lessons, and how do you track that progress?
– How do you tell a genuine learning need from a child who is simply young, new, or unsettled?
– How do the pastoral team and the learning-support team share what they see about one child?
– Can you give me an example of a child like mine, and how it went?
– Can I speak to a current parent whose child gets similar support, and will you show me outcome evidence — reading or language progress, not just attendance?
Then verify the answers, because a school can answer all of this cleanly and still deliver weakly. A confident “three specialists, one-to-one, we track progress” means little until you have spoken to a family living it and seen progress measured in the child’s actual reading or English, not in registers. Get every charge in writing while you are at it.
If a school answers these with specifics, it has real provision. If it answers with warmth and no detail, you have your answer too. The families who get this right are not the ones who asked whether a school supports children like theirs. They are the ones who asked exactly how, and waited for the number.