Plans are being drawn up for British schools to welcome 100,000 refugee children forced to leave their homes during the crisis in Ukraine.
England's Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi - who fled to Britain as a child from Iraq - auto-translate software was being rolled out on online learning hub Oak National Academy to help pupils who speak Russian or Ukrainian. Pupils will be able to access quizzes, video lessons with translated subtitles and worksheets, the Mirror reports.
The translation function will build on earlier work translating the online lessons into common languages other than English spoken in UK schools, such as Urdu and Polish. Speaking at the Association of School and College Leaders’ annual conference in Birmingham on Friday, Mr Zahawi said: “We will continue to support Ukrainians in any way we can.
“I know schools are doing what they can to support their students make sense of what they are seeing. And we are working with schools to ensure that the tens of thousands of Ukrainian children we will welcome to our shores will have a place in our education system.
“To support schools’ efforts, I’m delighted to announce that Oak National Academy has today rolled out an auto-translate function across all 10,000 of its online lessons. This will allow Ukrainian children arriving in the UK to access education in their native language as they transition into life and safety in the UK.”
He said a team in the Department for Education was "already making plans for a capacity of 100,000 children that we will take into our schools" but did not give further details.
The lessons will be available translated into both Ukrainian and Russian, as some refugee pupils will speak Russian as a first language. Mr Zahawi told the conference that the Ukrainian flag was flying over the Department for Education because it stood “shoulder to shoulder with all Ukrainians against the barbaric, criminal invasion of their sovereign democratic country”.
He added that it was “almost impossible to imagine the horror of what they are going through”. He said: "I came here many of you will know aged 11 unable to string a sentence of English together…even the thought of going to school was really scary. And if my teacher…hadn’t reminded me to funnel some of that creative, disruptive energy into something good, I certainly wouldn’t be here today."
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