MESH Summer Newsletter 2025
Summer greetings from the MESH team! As many classes draw to a close for the summer, and exam season passes, we hope that colleagues, friends and learners have had a fulfilling experience of learning English and other training supporting migrants in our region.
Of course, there is a great deal of ESOL activity that will continue through the summer!
Please visit LEYH to find provision in your area. You may be looking for classes over the summer, or planning to join a class from September, when the academic year in the UK begins. You can use the search facility in LEYH to find provision using your postcode or the name of the place you live. The main page of LEYH provides information on English classes, but you can also visit our Wider Learning Opportunities pages to find classes in many topics, from driving theory to IT to gardening. Our wider learning opportunities have been specially selected to support English learning progression.
You can also visit LEYH to find information and advice on a range of topics. Are you thinking of going to University? Do you want to do some volunteering? Are you a doctor, nurse or other health professional who wants to re-start their career in the UK? Please visit LEYH for information and advice on these areas.
If you are a provider, make sure information on your summer provision is available on LEYH. You may also want to check and update LEYH information on your classes ready for September. Please contact the MESH team on info@yhmesh.org.uk if you are unsure how to update.
It was lovely to see many Yorkshire & Humber colleagues at the NATECLA conference in Birmingham on the last weekend in June. Mary and John had a fine time at the conference, with plenty of stimulating sessions including Sam Shepherd of Shipley College’s fascinating workshop on listening to and working with learner language, and Emily Bryson’s keynote on creative practice, including an engaging encouragement to shaping a multilingual culture in the UK. We are all for that!
We were delighted to deliver a workshop on our Exploring & Belonging project at the conference. Please visit our ExBe pages to see the possibilities for using these resources in your own classroom. We attended a keynote on Combined Authorities and support for ESOL, featuring Bradford’s own Naheed Hussain. This is obviously a hot topic, as it is also the focus of our summer Regional Networking Event on 7th July in Leeds. See details here.
Over the summer months we at MESH well be continuing to work on our resources, including our new Pathways to ESOL Teaching resource, which we hope to launch in September. We are also working on a new resource on issues facing transnational families, building on our existing learning resource on this theme.
We will also be working on our next ESOL Lunchtime Showcase session, which is scheduled for 16th September 2025 12:30 to 13:30. Join us for discussion of ESOL and Digital Learning, a continuation of our focus on this theme at our Showcase on 4th June. You can register for the event here, and please do tell us if you would like to contribute a thought or example from your experience that speaks to the theme.
Don’t forget to look at our training page for upcoming training opportunities, and our staffroom for news including job opportunities across the sector.
Another summer activity is graduation ceremonies. Our own Angela Palmer graduated this summer with an MSc. in TESOL from St Andrews University. We could not be more proud of Angela! Not just because she has successfully completed her MSc while working virtually full-time for MESH, but also because the dissertation she completed for her degree, which analyses MESH’s Progression Pathways work, has been commended by the British Council as an outstanding contribution to the ELT field. As the assessors said, the dissertation has ‘an impact on the teaching of ESOL to migrant populations and refugees in many different contexts, helping to place learners at the centre of their learning journey, as opposed to being viewed as passive beneficiaries of education.‘
We could not have put it better ourselves….
Over the past few months MESH has left the social media platform X, due to concerns over its moderation policies and what what we see as the rise of misinformation and harmful content on this platform. You can still link up with us via Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, and we now have a new presence on Bluesky. Please follow us at @learningenglishyh.bsky.social.
Wishing all our colleagues, friends and ESOL learners a lovely summer!
