Integrating Bilingal learning onto early years education

Service design
Project Overview
The UK has seen a massive increase in bilingual families over the last few decades. Integrating successfully is vital, but so is family heritage. Bilingal is a service that I created to incorporate heritage language into the UK's early learning education.
My Contributions
I took full ownership of the service design process from initial research through to the final outcome.
Outcome: Bilingal
A service that equips parents, teacher and children with resources needed to celebrate & retain heritage language alongside English.
Exploratory Research
I employed a variety of research methods to explore the individual experiences, needs, and pain points of multiple customers & stakeholders.
Hunt Statement

I am going explore the language learning experience for bilingual children under the age of 5 and their parents, to design a solution that helps parents better prepare them for school in the UK.

I chose to consider the challenges from the perspective of parents, children & early learning professionals to ensure that I can create an outcome that works for the wider early learning context.
“I Could try to speak to him in Portuguese... But I feel like we have a little bit of a time constraint and if I wanted to be efficient and effective within... those few days that we have before he has to go back to nursery... let's just get it done in English.” - Participant 3
“There is a barrier in terms of assessment. Because you don't actually know what they're capable of, unless, I mean we're lucky, we've got... Polish speaking, Chinese speaking, Greek speaking, so if you've got them, they will tell us, they will say they can speak, they're fine." - Professional Participant 2
Yes, I am Dyslexic and you should probably get me tested soon, maybe I will do better than I am right now. - Participant #NIAB03
Bilingual parents find it challenging to teach and interact with the child in their heritage language.
Using an affinity diagram to synthesise my research help me uncover interesting findings, patterns & contradicting needs.
Key Insights
The research revealed several key insights, including a need for a more integrated bilingual experience and better understanding of bilingual development & progress.
Integration vs heritage language retentionIntegrating into English-focused communities often competes with the heritage language for parents' focus, often leading to heritage language being neglected.
Stress, perception & missed opportunities Parents miss out on opportunities to interact with their child in the heritage language due to stressing over perceived delays not realising that bilingual children will most likely catch up by the time they start school.
Lack of opportunity
to practice
parents struggle to find time & opportunities to immerse their child into their minority language. Many choose to travel far from home to make opportunities available.
Reliance on parents for heritage language Nursery staff need parents to tell them how a child is doing to understand where the child is overall, leaving a lot of space for error.
Limited access to specialist support. Nursery staff have to work harder to get external specialist support, or support them a child who is behind themselves.
Focusing on the cross culture family who may only have one bilingual parent
I developed user archetypes based on the research findings to help me empathize with their unique challenges and motivations specific to them. They also played a critical role in aligning stakeholders and workshop participants around a shared understanding of who we were designing for, enabling more focused ideation and strategic decision-making throughout the project.
Ideation, prototyping & development
I employed a highly collaborative ideation & development process relying on participatory and co-design approaches to ensure the cross-pollination of ideas and stakeholders' voices impacted the outcome positively.
Opportunity Statement

There’s an opportunity for a product or service that encourages parents who worry about their child’s English development to retain and celebrate their child’s minority language to enrich their educational experience.

...by increasing their confidence & motivation through supporting minority language in early learning environments.

I facilitated an ideation session with bilingual designers with various backgrounds to produce as many ideas to test with potential customers.
Seeing that my participants were, I added an unlimited budget and time to the crazy 8’s prompt to help the ideas flow. It worked instantly! Something to keep in mind.

– key key themes were: training for staff to better support bilingual children and bilingual staff that could be the ‘key person’ for that language.
“There is a barrier in terms of assessment. Because you don't actually know what they're capable of, unless, I mean we're lucky, we've got, um, Polish speaking, Chinese speaking, Greek speaking, so if you've got them, they will tell us, they will say they can speak, they're fine."
I recruited bilingual parents, early learning professionals & childhood bilinguals (adults reflecting on their bilingual upbringing) to gain insight from various perspectives and research methods to understand the nuances of the problem space.
I recruited bilingual parents, early learning professionals & childhood bilinguals (adults reflecting on their bilingual upbringing) to gain insight from various perspectives and research methods to understand the nuances of the problem space.
Creating a user journey that works for busy parents
Language sessions held in normal nursery hours creates value for parents without them doing anything they don't already do.
A better connected means better understood
By adding in our communications portal alongside our Heritage language professionals will improve the outcome for both family & nursery through sharing insights.
Ensuring the service works on a business & organisational level
By adding in our communications portal alongside our Heritage language professionals will improve the outcome for both family & nursery through sharing insights.
Key Takeaways & lessons
I really enjoyed working with the wonderful people who helped me along the way. Diving deeper into service design also gave me the insight into service design that I wanted to achieve when I began the project.
Collaboration Getting participants in early, and working in a highly collaboratively leads to better, more informed outcomes.
Timeboxing Moving forward fast became more important than getting things perfect because time was limited. Timeboxing helped maintain momentum. I could always revisit tasks to make improvements if needed.
Messy moves
I learned that it is okay to sacrifice some parts of the process when it is appropriate to move projects forward.