Community language learners
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.
Bristol Metropolitan College: Somali
With a large percentage of Black and Minority Ethnic children in the area, the maintained school encourages children with low levels of English to attend bilingual classes where they can use their mother tongue to help them in the core subjects. The accredited Somali language lessons can be chosen instead of French and German which helps newly arrived Somali pupils achieve a sense of pride. The Somali language teacher works closely with the maintained school's EAL teacher.
Dr Fazil Kucuk Turkish School
The case study describes how a Turkish supplementary school uses folk dancing as a way of learning Turkish, how they have made student learning more enjoyable by listening to the needs of pupils and how they go about celebrating pupil achievement.
Asian Resource Centre
The Asian Resource Centre runs a complementary school teaching eight community languages. They are an approved OCR, ICAA/EDEXCEL and AQA examination centre and work in partnership with a maintained school to use their premises. Both schools share good practice, test results and performance monitoring of pupils and help each other when needed.
