Just moved abroad? Why your child is suddenly struggling with English at school

What changed, and it is not your child

In an Indian school, English marks come largely from accuracy. Grammar exercises, comprehension answers, a prescribed format for letters. A child who learns the patterns does well.

In most schools in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and the international schools of the Gulf, English marks come largely from production. Write a personal response. Describe a character's feelings. Give your opinion with reasons. There is no format to learn and no single correct answer.

A child trained for the first system lands in the second and appears to have lost ability overnight. They have not. They are being measured on something they were never taught.

The four gaps that open up

1. Volume

Indian school answers are short and precise. A UK or Canadian task asks for half a page of the child's own words. The child writes three accurate sentences, which would have earned full marks in Delhi, and is marked as incomplete.

2. Opinion

Many Indian classrooms do not ask children what they think, so the child has no practice in it. Asked "What did you think of the ending?", they freeze, because they are searching for the right answer rather than their answer.

3. Spoken idiom

The playground language is different. Not the grammar, the idiom and the speed. Children often follow lessons perfectly and still feel lost at lunch, which affects confidence far more than parents expect.

4. Thinking language

The child still thinks in Hindi. In India that was invisible because everyone did. Abroad, the extra translation step shows up as slowness, and slowness in a timed task looks like weakness.

What foreign teachers see, and miss

A teacher abroad usually has no frame of reference for a child who speaks fluent conversational English but writes short, formal, accurate answers. Two things commonly follow.

• The child is referred for language support designed for beginners, which bores them and misses the real gap.
• Or the fluent speech is taken as proof that all is well, and the writing gap is put down to effort.

Both are worth heading off. When you meet the teacher, say plainly: my child's English is strong in accuracy and weak in extended personal writing, because that is what their previous school assessed. That sentence gets you a far more useful conversation than "she is struggling".

Do not drop Hindi at home

The instinct after a move is to switch the house to English to help the child catch up. It usually backfires.

A child's thinking language is where their ideas are richest. Cut it off and you do not get richer English, you get thinner ideas expressed in simpler English. The research on this is consistent, and so is what we see in class: children who keep a strong home language build stronger school English, not weaker.

Keep Hindi at home. Build the bridge between the two deliberately, using the method in our post on writing in English what your child thinks in Hindi. That is a different thing from abandoning one language for the other.

A practical plan for the first six months

Months	Focus	What it looks like
1 to 2	Volume	Daily writing with a word count, not a quality target. Eighty words, whatever they are.
2 to 4	Opinion	After every book or film: what did you think, and why. Two reasons, spoken then written.
4 to 6	Structure	Point, explain, example. The same shape their new school rewards.

Alongside this, read one book a week from the local school library, chosen by the child. Local books carry the idiom and the cultural references that textbooks do not, and that is most of what they are missing socially.

When to get help

Consider outside support if, after a full term, any of these are still true.

• The child avoids writing tasks specifically, rather than homework generally.
• They can tell you about a book in detail but write four lines about it.
• Their confidence has dropped in subjects other than English, which usually means the writing gap has started affecting science and humanities answers too.

Radhika teaches exactly this profile. Many of our families are in the UAE, the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and Singapore, and batches are scheduled in your own evening rather than Indian time. See how the time zones work, or book a free demo and talk it through.