Would you send your child to a bilingual nursery? Here’s why I would

Guest post disclaimer: This article is based on a contribution from Cennydd John, founder of Hatching Dragons, a Mandarin-English early years provider. His experiences and opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Saffron & Cyrus. I have added my own perspective as a parent raising a child across British and Persian cultures.

There is something slightly strange about the way we treat languages in Britain. Speak two as an adult and everyone is impressed. Introduce two to a toddler and somebody will wonder whether the poor child might become confused. Yet for millions of families, speaking more than one language is not an educational experiment. It is family life.

In our house, language has never been quite that simple either. My husband is Persian, I am British and Cyrus belongs to both cultures. Farsi is not merely a useful second language I might like him to acquire alongside swimming and remembering where he left his school shoes. It connects him to his baba, his extended family, Persian celebrations and a part of himself that can’t be neatly translated into English.

It is the question at the heart of Cennydd John’s argument for bilingual early years education, and a deceptively good one when parents are already investing so much money, trust and time in childcare.

When Cennydd originally wrote about his reasons for establishing Hatching Dragons, childcare in Britain was already under scrutiny. Parents were questioning costs, provision and whether returning to work after having children made financial sense. The political landscape has changed since then, but that particular kitchen-table calculation has hardly disappeared.

For many families, work is a necessity rather than a lifestyle choice, which means nursery has to perform two jobs at once. It enables parents to work, but it also occupies an enormous part of a child’s early life. Those hours are not simply childcare hours. They are hours in which children learn how to communicate, negotiate, trust other adults and exist as small independent people away from home.

Cennydd is a firm believer in what a good nursery can provide. In his original contribution, he argued that nursery gives children opportunities to socialise, develop friendships and build autonomy and self-confidence. Nursery is, after all, one of the first places where our children discover, sometimes rather indignantly, that the universe does not operate according to their personal timetable. Other children want the same toy. Somebody else gets a turn. Maman or Daddy is not standing two feet away ready to intervene.

Parents already provide love, attention, care and as much stimulation as most of us can muster before the first coffee has taken effect. Cennydd wanted to identify something genuinely additional. For him, the answer was fluency in another language.

His choice was Mandarin. He saw China’s international importance and wanted his son to have a language that could connect him to people and opportunities far beyond his immediate surroundings. In his original contribution, he imagined a future in which his son’s colleagues could be as likely to be in China as Chicago. It was a distinctly global view of what early years education might eventually unlock.

That thinking led him to establish Hatching Dragons, which opened a Mandarin-English early years setting in London’s Barbican in 2015. Rather than treating another language as an occasional activity, his model was designed to make Mandarin part of nursery life alongside the Early Years Foundation Stage.

Anyone who has attempted to learn a language as an adult will know the misery of memorising vocabulary only to discover that an actual human being speaks approximately 14 times faster than the recording on the language app. Young children encounter language differently. Words can become attached to familiar people, songs, stories, games and everyday routines rather than vocabulary lists.

This is where I would apply the brakes to some of the grander claims made about bilingualism. Cennydd’s original contribution pointed to research that he said showed cognitive and neurological benefits from dual-language learning, including advantages in analytical reasoning, creativity and attention. He also argued that bilingual children could outperform monolingual peers academically. Those are substantial claims, however, and the evidence around a universal “bilingual advantage” is more complicated than such neat conclusions suggest.

Bilingualism should not be sold to parents as a cleverness upgrade, and speaking two languages does not automatically produce a child who will sail through school while simultaneously composing sonnets and completing Sudoku. Children have enough expectations placed upon them already.

The more persuasive argument is also the simpler one. Bilingual early years education can give children sustained exposure to another way of communicating. They hear words in context and associate them with people, objects, songs, food, stories and familiar routines. Another language becomes something they encounter as part of ordinary life rather than simply something they are formally taught.

That is one of the most interesting things about it, the unfamiliar gradually becomes ordinary.

For Cennydd, Mandarin represented a window onto another part of the world. For me, the language I would most want Cyrus to carry with him is Farsi, and the reason has very little to do with employability.

Language carries family. It carries jokes that become less funny when somebody has to stop and explain them. It carries terms of affection, family stories and the way a father talks to his son when he is speaking the language that comes most instinctively to him. Some things technically can be translated, of course, but the translation is not always quite the same thing.

Raising a child between cultures has taught me that heritage does not download itself at birth. You have to make space for it. We do that through food, family and celebrations. We do it through Nowruz and Yalda, through Persian music and the small customs that become completely normal to a child because they happen at home. Language is another piece of that inheritance.

That is why I find the case for bilingual early years education more compelling when we stop treating another language as an academic advantage and start thinking about it as a route into another culture. For some children, it may also be a route back into their own.

Cennydd’s ambition for Hatching Dragons went beyond teaching Mandarin. His original model drew on bilingual early years approaches from around the world and sought to combine cross-cultural learning with England’s Early Years Foundation Stage. He wanted children to develop the confidence and capabilities to live in what he described as an increasingly intercultural, interconnected and international world.

There is a sentiment in his original contribution that I particularly like. He wanted children to understand that there was “something more out there” and to offer them something beyond what he could provide alone as a parent. That feels rather different from promising parents better grades or a future salary premium. It is about widening a child’s field of vision.

A child does not have to become completely fluent in Mandarin for exposure to Chinese language and culture to broaden their experience, just as a child does not need Persian heritage to enjoy Nowruz or understand why another family celebrates it. Learning that other people speak, eat, celebrate and live differently is an education in itself.

Nor does every nursery need to become bilingual. Parents need childcare that is safe, nurturing, accessible and affordable. A sophisticated curriculum is little consolation if your toddler is miserable or you need to remortgage the kitchen to pay the nursery bill.

But the bilingual nursery model raises an interesting challenge to the traditional approach. If children are already spending a substantial part of their earliest years in childcare,  we should think more ambitiously about what happens during those hours.

We tend to discuss childcare through the language of logistics: places, hours, funding, waiting lists and the frantic dash to collect a child before closing time. All of that matters because it determines whether childcare works for families in the first place. Yet children are also spending thousands of formative hours in these settings, so it seems reasonable to ask what else those hours might contain.

Not more formal schooling dressed up as “development”. And certainly not another opportunity for competitive parenting. More curiosity would do nicely.

A second language can show a child that the words spoken in their home are not the only words available. Cultural education can show them that their family’s traditions are not the only traditions worth knowing. For multicultural children such as Cyrus, it can do something else as well: reinforce the idea that belonging to more than one culture is not something that needs simplifying or explaining away.

Cennydd originally asked whether we could do more with the early years. A decade later, I think the question still stands. Perhaps the answer is not to cram more into childhood or promise parents cleverer children, but to make those early experiences wider, richer and a little more representative of the world they are actually growing up in.

Would it be for their future, their family or a little of both?

Occasional stories, experiments, discoveries and questions from Saffron & Cyrus.