“There was a difference. From Grade 1 to 5, it was like… let’s say, we were like from another planet and those people [ethnically diverse other students] were like from another planet. Though we existed, we never got to interact. ” - This dramatic characterisation expressed by a participant student in the study, should give all education and language planners pause. How is it possible that transition from one school sector to another that involves interacting with your age peers recalls alien planet life. And yet, time and time again in our experience and in the data which we report here, the effect of segregation, even if it is produced to allow mother tongue rights, results in this distancing and othering reflected in this young boy’s comment. He is referring to what we have called language policy as it is experienced, not as it is designed or imagined. Mother tongue rights in Sri Lanka were granted to acknowledge the co-existence and equal official status of the two constituent communities of the country but were implemented in such a way as to produce social isolation, and even estrangement. The boy whose words we are quoting, although he joined the BE class after Grade 1–5, in a multiethnic school where students of all ethnicities study under one roof, and yet with significant pedagogical separation, classrooms divided by Mother Tongue Instruction (MTI): Sinhala medium or Tamil medium. His experiences reflect the gravity of the degree of separation between ethnically diverse students in an education system which is mandated to enhance social cohesion. This is only a small snippet of a bigger story, noted previously by Lo Bianco in the 1990s in his advocacy at National Institute of Education at Maharagama while working on the Swabhasha program, but warning that it needed to be designed alongside the MTI and English programmes, with maximal cross-ethnic interaction. It is in this context that Wijesekera explored BE pedagogy in multiethnic schools, the only place where students of diverse ethnicities can study together in Sri Lanka and whose outcomes we report below.