In many parts of the world, school populations have become increasingly diversified in terms of language and culture. While educational policies in general may embrace and celebrate multilingualism and cultural diversity, practices in reality tend to devalue linguistic diversity by demanding students to learn ‘the mainstream language only’ in order to fit into the existing educational system. Immigrant families are often caught in the middle between how to use (and maintain) their own language and culture to support their children’s academic development, and how to educate their children in the dominant societal/school language with which they are often not familiar. In this workshop, I focus on how the gap between language policies at home and in the school can be bridged to provide a learning environment for immigrant students that is conducive for the development of their multiple languages and academic literacy. Using examples from existing research projects (e.g. FamilyLanguagePolicy, Curdt-Christiansen, Li Wei & Zhu Hua, 2017; Cunningham, 2019; Bezcioglu-Goktolga & Yagmur, 2019), I discuss how schools and immigrant families can tap into children’s linguistic and cultural resources to facilitate their academic development. Specifically, I will demonstrate how research contributes to communication between schools and parents by discussing family language policy and school policy, what research has to say about parents’ involvement and engagement in their children’s schooling from a language-socialisation perspective, and in what ways research reveals teacher ideologies about immigrant students and parents. This workshop identifies new theoretical and methodological approaches to studying differences in language and educational practices between immigrant families and schools. It emphasises how language policy in education can work jointly with FLP, to overcome multiple differences in educational practices between mainstream schools and immigrant families.