Feature: Asylum seekers: Home from home

The scene at Valentines High School in Ilford, Essex, at 10.50 on a Wednesday morning is a familiar one: it is break time and groups of teenagers congregate to chat, gossip and flirt. Snippets of conversations that drift across the playground reveal universal concerns - girlfriends, boyfriends, Big Brother, Arsenal Football Club - and also a myriad accents: from Urdu to Arabic, Polish to Turkish, Albanian to Essex.

The 1,300 students at Valentines speak more than 50 languages, and hail from all corners of the globe. Many are refugees and asylum-seekers, although the school prefers not to describe them as such. "We talk to all the students about refugees and asylum-seekers in assemblies and classes, so hopefully the kids have a positive view," says Jan Pearson, head of the school's Ethnic Minority Achievement team. "But we don't label students - we treat them all as individuals. We find it works best that way." Aisha Sohni, a young person's caseworker at the Refugee and Migrant Forum of East London (Ramfel), which works closely with the school, adds: "We use the term 'overseas student' rather than refugee or asylum-seeker."