Employability

Holyrood Secondary’s SLEA Multilingual submission is a real celebration of multilingual community learning involving a range of partners that reflects the diversity of their local space, including Finn’s Place, a community space in Battlefield where people come to learn, rest, connect and play, and Battlefield Community Project, run by a group of volunteers to maintain a community garden.  

Learners took part in multilingual workshops and also stilt walked for a community lantern parade celebrating El Día de los Muertos! This involved learners participating in stilt walk training lead by Modo Circus with Purpose and conducted in Italian, French and Spanish. Learners had the chance to develop metaskills for real purposes such as collaboration, leadership, creativity, presentation skills, public speaking and organisation. 

The school Travel and Tourism class also took part in an intergenerational community event with Finn’s Place in which they shared photos from a recent walking tour of Glasgow murals for community members to input with stories and anecdotes of Glasgow life.  

Another strand to this submission is the partnership with Ando Glaso, a Roma organisation in Scotland that supports Roma artists, promotes cultural heritage, and builds opportunities in the arts. Learners engaged with them through meetings, workshops, and a youth festival and were inspired by Roma role models. Language Leaders supported participation and created displays celebrating Roma culture. Follow-up activities included bilingual poetry and music recording. Learners gained cultural pride, language awareness, and insight into creative careers. The partnership has led to ongoing engagement, with some learners attending after-school music and recording sessions. 

Finally, learners wrote welcome letter to new arrival asylum seeker in their mother tongue languages to be sent to Refuweegee in order to use their multilingual abilities to reach out to others. 

The verification team loved absolutely everything about this outstanding submission from Holyrood Secondary School, from the project name to the planned next steps, and everything in between! It achieves a most richly deserved GOLD award – congratulations!  

This submission reflects a project that is truly and very naturally collaborative, multicultural and multilingual. It is highly commendable for the strategic planning involved, and the strong partnerships that have been built with local community partners, reflecting the heritage and community languages within their school. The inclusion of, and focus on, social justice, pupil voice and reflecting the local community makes the whole submission really relevant and compelling, as does the strong collaboration with EAL. The range of meta skills, social skills and even musical and recording skills that feature in this project is unrivalled.  

This project is exactly what we were hoping to see in the creation of the SLEA – Multilingual. We cannot praise Holyrood Secondary School highly enough for their ethos of multilingualism, multiculturalism and inclusion – well done again!