Hope English School: The Sheffield charity helping refugees and asylum seekers speak the language

But, you can’t speak the language.

That’s where a charity in Sheffield can help. Hope English School (HES) began in 2016, offering language lessons to refugees and asylum seekers less able to attend classes already on offer because of “any kind of complication to your life,” be that childcare responsibilities, learning and access needs, or whatever else, says Lucy Morley, fundraising, communications and volunteer co-ordinator.

HES was started by a group of teachers, including Katy Sturdey and Anna Bollinger, as a community interest company before becoming a registered charity in 2019.

They found that the usual college courses on offer did not always meet the needs of learners settling in the UK. Lucy says: “If it’s a family group that have come over, one person in the family group would get access to these classes. And the majority of times that would be the man in the family that would go and access these classes, and that would leave the woman at home with or without children. She was at home and they were just getting more isolated.”

HES now works with with hundreds of learners but have no more than 12 to a class, says Lucy, while one-to-one tuition is also available. Class and administration volunteers are an important part of the organisation, but learners are taught by qualified teachers.

“It was really important to us that we paid our teachers and that they saw it as something on a par with other teaching that they did,” says Lucy.

It’s not just about learners being able to talk to the person next door – language matters if they have children and need to talk to their teacher, find work, go to the supermarket or arrange doctor’s appointments.

“From a sort of social cohesion point of view, it’s really hard for us to build relationships with the people around us who live on our road if they don’t speak the language that we speak,” says Lucy.

When the pandemic happened and classes went online, it was apparent that there was a need for basic digital learning. Consequently, the school now also offers a 12-week digital skills course too.

Lucy says: “Obviously, it’s hard if it’s not in your language and it’s also doubly hard if you have never had access to a laptop. There’s quite a lot of our students who aren’t literate in their own language, let alone in English, so it’s a big challenge for them to get to grips with the technology.

“We find that we’ve had some really amazing stories. We had this one gentleman who said: ‘I used to hate it when my children used to come to me with questions about their homework, because I just felt completely unable to help them’. Obviously, as a father, he felt like he should be able to help his children and then once he knew how to do the basics of the computer, he was so proud of himself because he felt like he could sit down and really support them in their learning.”

Students come from all over the world. When Russia invaded Ukraine, a lot of people started to attend but there are others from countries such as Iran, Eritrea and Somalia.

“There’s a mixture of levels as well,” says Lucy, as some can’t speak a world of English but those with professional backgrounds might.

The school also works with the ReSTORE (Refugee Support, Training, Orientation, Recruitment, and Education), a South Yorkshire programme designed to support refugees with backgrounds in nursing and midwifery in their home countries to become nurses and nurse associates in the UK.

Meanwhile, a class is starting for deaf refugees and asylum seekers, for which the school raised more than £1,000 with two events. People in the class, which is a pilot project, will be learning British Sign Language (BSL) and English for reading and writing.

“These are the sorts of individuals for whom accessing a college course is just impossible. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, for them at the moment,” says Lucy, who has been working on creating the class for about 18 months.

Of course, while hope is in the name, it’s not always easy to feel that way. When riots spread across the country last summer following the Southport murders, one of the places attacked was a Holiday Inn Express in nearby Rotherham, which at the time was homing asylum seekers.

“It did feel quite a scary place to be,” says Lucy. “I know a lot of our students were really afraid. They didn’t want to go out. We cancelled all of our classes and we took all of our contact information off our website because obviously we want to protect our staff but we also just wanted to protect our students.

“I think that felt, for me, it was the first time where I was like, oh, there will be people who really don’t like what we’re doing. It’s very easy to think that everyone will support what you’re doing as a good thing, but that isn’t the case.

“But we were really encouraged by Sheffield’s response as a City of Sanctuary and just the overwhelming ‘hope over hate’ rhetoric that came from Sheffield, I think was really encouraging for us but also hopefully for the people that we work with as well.”

Language, though, is seen as a route to hope.

“Ultimately, whatever you’ve been through in your life, you should always have hope that the future is going to be better and brighter.”