Community cohesion
Bantock Primary School
Bantock Primary School has opened up its premises for community languages classes to take place on Saturday mornings. 120 students attend the 9 classes which provide a relaxed atmosphere, aiming to instill passion and pride for community languages learners. A conscious decision has been made within the school to promote equality of languages within the school and all religious festivals including Eid, Christmas and Diwali are given equal weighting. All learners are expected to participate in the celebrations, which has led to a genuine interest in languages and cultures. The Local Authority plays an active role in recruiting and training the language teachers.
PAIWAND
This case study describes how a large Afghan supplementary school pro-actively searches out partnership with the mainstream sector to increase impact on learning, behaviour, parental commitment and social cohesion.
Russian Saturday School
The case study describes a Russian supplementary school working in partnership with a language college. The partnership was facilitated by the City Council when a demand for Russian and English lessons was identified due to an increase in the Russian population in the area. The partnership takes the form of mentoring, sharing exam information and referring pupils to the Russian school. Student behaviour has improved and the partnership has helped contribute to community cohesion.
John Kelly Boys’ Technology College
This college decided to set up their own Saturday school to provide pre GCSE classes in the school’s main languages Arabic, Urdu and Gujarati, as well as ESOL classes to parents and the local community. Thanks to the Saturday school, the profile of the college has been raised in the local community and more students than ever are taking community languages at GCSE, AS and A2 level which has had a positive impact on the college’s GCSE results.
Levenshulme High School
In this case study, a maintained girls’ school is working in an international partnership with a Saudi-Arabian girls’ school on the theme of 'women in business', a British Council project, aimed to help bring teachers from the UK and teachers from the Middle East together to help young people develop informed and positive perceptions of each other’s cultures.
The Tamil Academy of Language and Arts
This case study describes how a local Tamil group have established a successful partnership with several mainstream schools via a mutual interest in language and the arts.
Sarah Bonnell
The case study describes a maintained school committed to language learning. Bengali, Mandarin, Urdu as well as French, German, Italian and Spanish are taught within the curriculum and lunch-time clubs offer Arabic, Farsi, Gujarati and Yoruba language teaching. No distinction is made between MFL and community languages which are normally referred to as World languages. Unqualified staff are supported by the school in gaining full teacher status. The school is also involved in exciting overseas projects and their commitment to internationalism enhances its embrace of equal opportunities.
Anglo-Spanish Day Nursery: Community Cohesion
At this Anglo-Spanish Day Nursery in Clapham, South London, children from all cultural backgrounds are cared for and are given a fully bilingual early education. Gloria Gómez Canal, who co-runs the nursery, explains how bilingual children are more culturally aware and behave better than monolingual children.
CEDF
In this case study a maintained school approached a complementary school to start weekend Panjabi language classes. The Panjabi classes have led to improvements in children’s confidence and have had a positive effect on community cohesion and growing links with parents has led to enrichment of the Panjabi community. The success of the Panjabi classes has increased the profile of the maintained school.
Bristol Metropolitan College: Polish
The case study describes a Polish Saturday school operating from a maintained school premises. Due to the rise of Polish children in the area, the maintained school have employed a teaching assistant as a Polish Liaison Officer who mentors and supports Polish pupils in adapting to the English school system as well as helps integrate new children into the school. Being given the extra support to succeed in Polish GCSE exams helps raise the self esteem of Polish students and has raised the mainstream school’s results and profile.
