Caley started volunteering at Baytree two and a half years ago. She holds a TEFL qualification and teaches the girls English for a few hours each week, as well as taking them on days out. Last Thursday I tagged along – Caley and I took six girls from the Into School programme to the Victoria and Albert Museum for the day.A couple of girls had migrated with their families from Bolivia. Another girl had come to London from Aleppo in Syria. Other than messing about with the girls, making some of those viral mannequin videos around the museum, Caley and I taught them English phrases and how to get the tube, and chatted to them about how they’re dealing with the culture shock.“Part of it is about teaching them English but it’s also about keeping them occupied,” says Rosanna, explaining why Into School do what they do. “We taught a girl last term who had been in the country about eight months, stuck in her room, without interacting with anyone else bar her family because she didn’t speak the language.”The girl Rosanna is talking about was 14, from Somalia, and had come over here to live with an older sister she’d never met before. Rosanna remembers how “in the first weeks [of Into School] she was so quiet and shy but after a few weeks she had a beaming smile on her face.”While Into School offer girls sessions to get help on their schooling application forms, sometimes problems still arise. The Somalian girl Rosanna told me about faced similar problems to Feven from Eritrea, in that she couldn’t apply for school until she had proof of address, and so spent months out of formal education while she waited for her sister to become her legal guardian.Rosanna points out that, once girls have applied to school, things don’t necessarily get easier. Depending on the age of the girl and the school, usually they will have to do tests and interview for admission and, in Rosanna’s experience, some schools don't want migrants or refugees because they think it can be bad for the school’s GCSE exam results.That’s despite research from think tank OECD that showed quite the opposite Once in school, kids for whom English is not a first language are usually enrolled on a Special Educational Needs course called an ESOL, which stands for English for Speakers of Other Languages. But in state schools, there’s only so much support they can get, due to resources, which is why many girls continue to attend programmes like Into School for extra support.“The girls can come along even if they’ve started school,” says Rosanna. “On Tuesday afternoons we have quite a few girls coming back for extra English classes. If they do the college intensive ESOL it’s usually only three or four days a week so can still come to our after-school activities, homework club or mentoring.”