Roughly half of the migrants and refugees arriving in the UK already hold a degree or equivalent tertiary qualification.[1] They include doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers, finance professionals, creatives, entrepreneurs, and skilled tradespeople – people whose professional expertise the UK badly needs.
Yet 85% of ESOL learners leave provision at Entry Levels 1 to 3: a standard too low to support entry into skilled work, professional re-registration, or mainstream vocational or academic study.[2] The two facts sit uncomfortably together. If half of learners arrive already qualified, and the overwhelming majority never reach a level of English that lets them use those qualifications, something in the system is failing to connect the two.
It might be tempting to assume this gap reflects how difficult English is to learn at higher levels, or how long it takes. However, the evidence points somewhere more specific: the curriculum itself isn’t designed to take a qualified professional anywhere near their own field.
The ESOL core curriculum is over twenty years old and its legacy casts a long shadow. ESOL courses on offer tend to be designed around ‘survival English’ – booking a GP appointment, managing a tenancy, opening a bank account. Essential, but not sufficient. There is very little structured pathway from that content toward the technical and professional language a nurse, engineer or teacher would need to re-enter their field. The Bell Foundation’s research is blunt about the consequence: this leaves large numbers of ESOL learners underemployed, unable to make use of the skills and experience they already hold, simply because the language layer above survival English was never built.[3]
There’s also a specific, well-documented problem in the system’s design. Once a learner passes ESOL Entry Level 3, they are often judged to have sufficient English to move into Functional Skills English – a qualification designed for first-language speakers who need help with literacy, not people still building their command of English as a second language. In practice, Functional Skills English does not align well with the needs of second-language learners, and the mismatch produces the pattern you might expect: disengagement, drop-out, and failed exams.[4] For a newly arrived nurse or engineer, Entry Level 3 is precisely the point where language-for-work content should be introduced. Instead, it’s often where the ESOL pathway ends.
Underpinning all of this is a data blind spot. Providers largely don’t record learners’ prior qualifications or professional background at enrolment. There’s no field in the national data system that flags whether an ESOL learner arrived as a qualified doctor, a nurse, or a first-time jobseeker with no formal education.[5] Without that information, colleges can’t target sector-specific content at the learners who need it, funding bodies can’t measure whether investment is unlocking skilled labour, and the scale of the problem stays invisible.
This isn’t a uniquely British problem, and the wider evidence base is stark. Across the OECD, around a third of highly educated immigrants are working in jobs below their qualification level – more than double the rate for native-born graduates.[6] A cross-European investigation covering Eurostat labour force data found that almost half of college-educated migrants are overqualified for the work they do, and nearly twice as likely as native-born graduates to be unemployed.[7]
In the UK, the Bell Foundation casework has tracked recent arrivals from Afghanistan and Ukraine who arrived already qualified in nursing and engineering, both professions the UK is short-staffed, whose skills sit unused while their English catches up to a level nobody has built a route toward.[8] At SLC, we’ve recently worked with refugee doctors, nurses and pharmacists working as social care workers and receptionists, accountants working in factories, and teachers, dentists and HR managers working as baristas and admin assistants.
The picture isn’t uniformly bleak. Where providers have built a bridge between ESOL and vocational or professional content, the results are encouraging. One model, sometimes called ‘ESOL Plus’, combines ESOL tuition with subject-specific training in fields like science, motor vehicle maintenance, or plumbing, timed to run alongside language learning rather than only after it.[9] Learners who go through this blended structure are reported to be more motivated, more engaged, and less likely to drop out than those on standalone ESOL courses as the point of learning English becomes visible and immediate.
At a local level, several devolved authorities are already experimenting with versions of this. Liverpool City Region ran a ‘Test and Learn’ pilot specifically to identify what stops ESOL learners progressing into work, and to test course content, engagement and delivery changes in response.[10] Cambridgeshire and Peterborough set up ESOL Local Planning Partnerships to map demand across the region’s main providers and target gaps — including a workplace-based ESOL pilot and dedicated mobile teaching resources for employer-facing delivery.[11]
At SLC, we’ve worked with strategic migration partnerships, local authorities, and refugee support organisations to help doctors, nurses, and pharmacists pass OET, an essential part of their professional registration process, or IELTS so teachers, psychologists and engineers can take master’s degrees. We’ve also worked with accountants and other finance professionals so they have the requisite language to take professional exams. However, funding for such contracts is thin on the ground and rely on local champions who have identified the problem and want to solve it.
These initiatives are small-scale relative to the size of the problem, but they show the blended, sector-specific model isn’t hypothetical. It’s already running, just not at anything like national coverage.
The Bell Foundation’s recommendations to Skills England set out what would need to change to make this the norm rather than the exception: ESOL standards from Entry Level through to Level 2 that explicitly build in language for work and further study, not just survival English; careers advice and guidance built for second-language speakers navigating an unfamiliar UK job market; and, underpinning everything else, a simple marker added to the national learner record identifying which learners are ESOL speakers, so that progress, drop-out and destination can finally be tracked properly across the whole system, not just within discrete ESOL courses.[12]
None of these asks are overly ambitious. They’re closer to basic infrastructure than radical reform: know who your learners are, teach them the English their target sector needs, and don’t discard them at Entry Level 3 into a qualification that wasn’t built for them.
The gap between what arrives – doctors, engineers, nurses, teachers – and what the system currently delivers – survival English with no clear route beyond it – is well evidenced and fixable. The models that address it effectively share a common shape: ESOL married to sector-specific, vocational content, ideally from an early stage. This is an opportunity for the government’s current ESOL review. Let’s hope they take it.
The Language of Change