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Innovation in language teaching - the Mary Glasgow 14-19 Curriculum Prize
Fri, 9 March 2007
The Mary Glasgow Language Trust recently launched a major three-year programme of prizes for successful curriculum innovation in modern language teaching and learning for 14-19 year old students in schools and colleges. This has been made possible by a grant from the Nuffield Foundation.
The first prize winners will be chosen this year. The purpose of the prizes is to reward successful teaching projects which lead to a higher take-up of language learning in the 14-19 sector, and which could serve as inspiration for other schools and colleges.
This news is particularly timely since it comes just as the Languages Review, led by Lord Dearing, reports its findings. Lord Dearing was asked by Alan Johnson, the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, to examine the government’s strategy on teaching modern foreign languages in England's schools, including the decision to allow languages to be optional in the last two years of secondary education. This decision triggered an immediate and substantial year-on-year fall in the number of young people learning a language after the age of 14, with a consequent reduction in the range and scope of modern language teaching in state secondary schools.
The Mary Glasgow Trust had been concerned about this problem, and identified that much could be done to tackle it by those who determine the curriculum in schools. As a result, the Trust officially launched the Mary Glasgow 14-19 Curriculum Prize last September at the 2006 Awards Ceremony in Edinburgh for the European Award for Languages.
Worth £5000 each, the Mary Glasgow Curriculum Prizes are intended to reward and publicise courses which make language learning more engaging and successful for young people who might otherwise give them up, and which could inspire other schools and colleges to do something similar with their curriculum. The Mary Glasgow Language Trust is therefore looking for projects which aim to do something new and different. This could apply to how students learn, what they learn, who they learn from or with, how their learning is timetabled, where they learn or how their work is assessed.
The Trust is also seeking to reward projects which look ahead, across the 16+ divide, in order to prepare students in appropriate ways for further and higher education and future employment.
The Mary Glasgow Language Trust’s aim has always been to support and encourage outstanding curriculum development in the teaching of languages. Since 2000, they have been collaborating with CILT, the National Centre for Languages, as a partner in the development of the European Awards for Languages (EAL). The Trust’s special contribution to this is an annual £2000 prize awarded to the EAL winning project which has most impressed the Trust’s judges.
The high monetary value of these new 14-19 Curriculum prizes involves a requirement that winners will develop and make more widely available high quality documentary and teaching materials, so that other schools and colleges can benefit. It also reflects the importance of the current need to challenge the perception that it is somehow unnecessary to learn other languages. With only a quarter of state schools now making modern languages compulsory after the age of 14, the country could lose a generation of linguists.
Last Updated Fri, 9 March 2007