Case Study

Introduction

Wilkes Green Junior School in Birmingham boasts several accolades and awards including Beacon School, School Achievement Award, Investor in People Award and Healthy School Status. The Head, Mr Mangan has himself been awarded an MBE.

Arrangement for a Community Languages Complementary School

Wilkes Green currently teaches Panjabi on Wednesdays from 3.30-4.30pm. Lessons are free and funded by the Birmingham LA supplementary schools grant with photocopying, exercise books, stationery, insurance, etc, covered by the school. Panjabi books are the main source of materials and e-learning programmes were previously tried in the freely available IT suite and interactive white boards. Parents generally send their children for Panjabi classes to maintain fluency or to learn from scratch since they lost out when they were at school. Mr Mangan manages all aspects of the project.

Lessons are particularly popular in September, although numbers tail off in winter months. This is very much a project for the whole local community. Children and even parents from Afro-Caribbean, European or East European backgrounds as well as students from other local primary and secondary schools have been welcomed.

History of the project

Before coming to Wilkes Green, Mr Mangan had prior experience of complementary community languages in a school when he taught Panjabi voluntarily. On arriving at Wilkes Green around 18 years ago, he found an Urdu and Panjabi programme taught on an ad hoc voluntary basis. His proposal to introduce a more structured approach faced opposition from many of the school governors who believed it would interfere with the learning process. However, as a Teacher of English as an Additional Language, Mr Mangan believed that developing mother tongue skills would enhance and not interfere with the acquisition of the target language. Eventually, reluctant agreement enabled classes in Urdu, Bengali, Panjabi and Gujarati to start.

Gradually demand for Urdu and Bengali classes declined when many parents preferred their children to follow a more Islamic education. Despite much cajoling to keep the children coming, Wilkes Green lost out to local mosques and other organisations. The small Gujarati class also closed due to difficulties in replacing the teacher who left for work elsewhere.

Classes are occasionally visited by Mr Mangan and observed by the Birmingham LA supplementary schools inspector each year. There have been successes in GCSE Panjabi.

Successes

Students benefit greatly from raised self-esteem, feeling their language is valued and recognised by the school, teachers and other students. Parents and relatives are also happy to see their children speaking Panjabi and learning about their culture.

Learning Panjabi certainly supplements and enhances the children’s learning experience. Where possible, there is an informal link between mainstream and complementary Panjabi classes, e.g. sometimes the teacher is asked to include certain topics from the day-time lessons or where a Panjabi-speaking child is struggling, the parents are recommended to send the child to the complementary school.

In the past, when more languages were available and taught by teachers or teaching assistants from within the school, the complementary school benefited from new curriculum development carried out by the qualified staff and a general sense of being included as part of the school.

Challenges

Mr Mangan feels he has yet to realise his ideal of creating a definite link between the mainstream and complementary classes, where the community language is taught through the curriculum and the curriculum is taught through the language. Initially, he gained some success when one of the classroom assistants was also the complementary school Panjabi teacher. Once a week some Maths, Science and English lessons were taught through Panjabi in order to support and clarify various concepts. However, since the classroom assistant left this formal arrangement is on hold.

The main challenge is the sourcing of teachers who are qualified and available for both mainstream and complementary Panjabi teaching. The current teacher has teaching qualifications from India, but does not have a UK-trained background and so is not experienced in the system, UK language teaching methodology and the use of ICT for young learners.

Other challenges include either recruiting teachers from outside the school who are available for just for one hour at 3.30pm or finding willing teachers from inside the school who are not busy with other after-school activities.

When Saturday classes were tried, the experiment failed because:

• sourcing teachers was still a problem
• parents often had other weekend commitments
• it was difficult to find a site manager to open the school for just 2 hours
• it was seen as a ‘cheap baby-sitting’ opportunity by some parents.

The future

Mr Mangan believes in his vision of a complementary school that really supplements the maintained school with language support that is free from ideology and religion.

‘I feel that my job is to make sure that we provide wide opportunities for children so that they become better citizens of this world; so that they have a better understanding of each other, a better understanding of themselves in order to become better human beings.’

About the School