Bilingualism and biliteracy are common in many European states and with mass movement of populations these are increasing. Official educational policies, however, do not generally value all languages and their corresponding literacies, and often the advantages that biliteracy brings about remain hidden and undervalued. In addition, biliteracy may be seen as detrimental to the mainstream school literacy progress.This paper focuses on young bilingual children's parallel early literacy experiences in three different languages, English, Urdu and classical Arabic, and in three strikingly different types of classes in England. It draws on an ethnographic study that views literacy as a socio-cultural practice and sets out to discover what kinds of advantages or additional strengths bilingual children might bring from their community literacy practices and from their experiences of learning to read in two or more languages simultaneously into their English literacy lessons. The methodology includes ethnographic research methods ranging from field notes, participant observations, audio and video tapes to interviews with teachers and parents. The study follows six children - five of Pakistani and one of Bangladeshi background, four boys and two girls - from their Reception class (4-5 years) to Year Two class (6-7 years) in a Watford Garden school. Around 15% of this school's pupils are of second generation Pakistani background and were born in Watford. The paper examines these bilingual children's early literacy experiences in three different types of schools in Watford: English literacy lessons in a mainstream school, Urdu lessons in a community school, and classical Arabic / Qur'anic lessons in a local Mosque. Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, is rarely the first language for these children. Their main home language is Pahari, sometimes described as the Mirpuri dialect of Punjabi, which is distinctively different from Urdu. Classical Arabic is a language the children do not speak or understand, but use daily for learning to read the Qur'an. A number of studies, that have explored the benefits of bilingualism per se, have often used literacy learning as a way of establishing 'advantages' of bilingualism (most influentially Cummins, 1979; 1984; 2000). In effect bilingual children's ability in learning to learn to read and write in a new language is often allowed to stand for general 'cognitive' advantages (Edelsky, 1996). There are far fewer studies that have focused specifically on the literacy-learning-advantages. But the video extracts and transcripts presented here reveal that for these children learning to read simultaneously in three different languages resulted in social, emotional and cognitive advantages, and in multilingual flexibility. They were very aware of their own learning process, what they had to do as a learner in each school, which potentially provided them innovative new ways of entering the world of English literacy. They were also able to discuss their literacy learning in highly analytical and complex terms. At the age of 5 they examined, translated and reflected on words in different languages, how they are written in different scripts and contrasted sound systems in different languages. Key words Early Literacy; Bilingualism; Community Schools; Multilingual Flexibility; Social, Emotional and Cognitive Advantages; Multilingual Schools.