The paper presents findings from ongoing, longitudinal, ethnographic research with primary-aged children and their families from Pakistani- and Bangladeshi-heritage communities in a post-industrial, multilingual city in the north of England. In such long-settled communities, multilingualism is still a normal and natural feature of everyday life, and part of how people construct their identities as second- and third-generation immigrant heritage British citizens. The research findings are contextualised in the wider community contexts (both local and global) of the children and also the policy contexts of the ‘monolingualising’ (Heller, 2007) education system in England. All the children attend a complementary, multilingual Saturday class, which forms the nexus of the research. Data have been collected in small-scale qualitative case studies of individual children and their language learning in home, mainstream school and complementary class, and include photographs, video and audio recordings of classroom interaction and children’s work from both classroom contexts. These are contextualised in interviews with their mainstream teachers, observations in their classrooms and visits to their homes to interview their parents and observe family learning settings. The findings reveal the family histories, both locally and globally, and their mediations with the different education settings that the children inhabit.
