‘You’ve got friends’: Birmingham school scheme aims to ease refugee trauma

‘It’s not just language that’s the barrier, it’s dealing with everything that they’ve gone through.’ Young people on the Core Hello programme. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Many of the pupils who arrive in Gemma Patel’s classroom at Birmingham’s City academy don’t speak.

“When students first come to us, they often don’t talk, they don’t communicate,” she said during a break from teaching a lesson on verbs. “It’s not because they can’t, but because they haven’t necessarily felt able to before.”