AVIOR was an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership aimed to reduce the achievement gap between native and non-native pupils in Europe. European partners worked together to make bilingual literacy and numeracy materials for pupils aged 4-8 years available to primary schools and to share best practices among teacher trainers and school leaders on how to create inclusive multilingual classrooms. Schools across Europe are seeing an increasing number of children who are either born in another country or whose parents are immigrants and who do not speak the school language at home (Cummins, 2014). This presents a challenge as schools are expected to deliver quality education for all children, regardless of their ethnic background or linguistic abilities. Research shows: Children learn best in their mother tongue. Children’s ability to learn a second (official) language does not suffer. In fact literacy in a mother tongue lays the cognitive and linguistic foundation for learning new languages (OECD, 2015). Learning in their mother tongue during primary and secondary school allows children to become literate in the official language quickly, emerging as fully bi/multilingual learners in secondary school. More importantly, their self-confidence grows, they remain interested in learning, and they stay in school longer, and stand a greater chance of fulfilling their educational potential, enabling them to make greater contributions to the society in which they live (Duarte, 2016; Agirdag & Kambel, 2018). Multilingualism is not at all common practice in schools around Europe. The costs involved and a lack of awareness among policy makers about the benefits of mother tongue learning explain why few EU countries provide mother tongue support for migrant children (Agirdag & Kambel, 2018). Impact of the Erasmus+ project The outcome for primary school children between 4-8 years with migrant backgrounds who speak a different language at home than the school language was that they felt more meaningful in school and that it matters who they are. Also parents got more involved since ‘their’ language had a place in school. Our bilingual materials in numeracy and literacy learning are available online as open educational resources.

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