ESOL charity reopens in Barnsley in Covid-19 secure premises
Registered charity – Educational Learning Support Hub (ELSH) is reopening in new premises next week and will offer online ESOL classes to Barnsley’s BAME local refugee, asylum seeker and migrant community.
ELSH is proud to announce the reopening in new premises on the 1st floor of the ELIM Community Centre in Warren Quarry Lane, Barnsley S70 4NF. ELSH closed in March at the beginning of the Lockdown and ever since has been battling to fully reopen while restricted to providing limited online help to our students.
“The National Lottery Community Fund, The Good Things Foundation, Barrow Cadbury Trust, Coalfields Regeneration Trust; as well as local funders, SYFAB and Barnsley Council’s Covid Resilience Fund – have all helped ELSH keep going for the last seven months and fulfil our plans to expand our services from now on,” commented ELSH founder and CEO, Florentine Bootha-King. “A big thank you from ELSH goes to them all.”
“From the outset of COVID -19, we knew that our old premises in Sheffield Road would not provide the Covid-Secure environment for face to face lessons to restart safely for its students and teachers. We also recognised that we needed to expand our lessons in English as a second language to provide them online 24/7 too,”
ELSH will reopen for the enrolment of students from 10:00 on Monday 2 November. Students are asked to ring 01226 643249 or complete the contact form on our new website www.elshub.org.uk rather than to turn up on that day.
“We ask students to be patient as we expect demand to be very high. We will arrange an appointment with them to come in and fill out an application form, create a student ID card and discuss their individual needs. We can now hire out mobile phones and Wi-Fi equipment so they can fully participate in our new and exciting online learning programme. If further COVID-19 restrictions come in we can seamlessly switch to providing 100% of our lessons online.”
“We will also be providing lessons in life skills, including mathematics and IT. ELSH serves the recently arrived BAME community that faces significant prejudice, discrimination and disadvantages in gaining further education and work due to their insufficient grasp of English. ELSH aims to help them overcome these barriers,” added Mrs Bootha-King.
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Notes:
ELSH has been a registered charity 1186050 since October 2019, but before that, it was a local community organisation operating in Barnsley for many years. Our motto is ‘Bringing Communities together through English’. We believe that this is an important role ELSH provides for Barnsley.
Please contact Mark Wilson our Office Manager/Volunteer Coordinator on 07709741264 or mark@elshub.org.uk if you would like us to provide photographs.