Hello and welcome to Nursery World’s webinar on ‘Multilingualism in the early years: Celebrating every child’, in partnership with Polylino.

Polylino is a multilingual digital picture book service for nurseries and primary schools to use with children up to the age of seven.

Multilingualism is the norm on a global scale – more children in the world grow up to be multilingual than monolingual. The latest figures show that England may be heading in that direction – in 2021/22 almost one in three [29.1 per cent] of children in state-funded nurseries had English as an additional language

With the number of bilingual and multilingual children increasing in nurseries and pre-schools in the UK, we will look at approaches that celebrate and support them as well as strategies to ensure all children are engaged in their setting’s language and literacy learning, while looking at how multilingualism can promote inclusive practice and children’s understanding of the world. We will also discuss different ways to work with parents and how digital solutions can be key to pulling everything together.