Author: Virginie Bradbury, Dundee City Council and Pan Tayside consortium
The Pan Tayside approach involves three authorities: Dundee City Council, Angus Council and Perth and Kinross Council, working together to implement languages in the primary schools. All staff tutors as well as a strategy group meet regularly and share the same vision in order to support local schools. In Dundee City Council, for example, teaching staff are offered a 10 week course in French for beginners delivered by myself as I am a native French speaker.
There will also be further opportunities for staff to receive training on the PowerLanguage Platform from Richard Tallaron and his team (LFEE Europe). As one of our clusters is piloting L3, we will organise twilights for Spanish and German in the near future. In September, we organised a Pan Tayside 1+2 conference where professionals were able to share good practice and concerns with a panel of languages representatives and Education Scotland. Staff were also able to extend their professional network through discussion and activities with a focus on developing Scotland's workforce.
In Dundee, all schools have engaged with the 1+2 approach, delivering French from P1. The majority of schools have adopted a whole school approach with teachers supporting each other and pupils becoming confident individuals by delivering French assemblies, successful learners by sharing and responding to what they have learned and responsible citizens by studying other cultures.
Working with Clare Carroll from SCILT, we will offer a two-session workshop on 'Tackling transition' in March and June 2016.
Dundee's literacy education support officer, Gail Stirling, and I have decided to create a French phonics programme following the same scheme used in our local schools. This will help staff and pupils alike with their French pronunciation and spelling.
Return to December 2015 newsletter