Employment

The title of Beeslack’s project arose from the plans for a new school to be built on the Bush Science Estate in Midlothian. This is billed as the science academy of Midlothian. The Languages department has created strong connections with local industry to publicise the importance of languages in all careers, including STEM.  

There were several strands to this project, managed by the creation of an innovative Employability calendar by the Languages department in order to ensure a DYW focus in the curriculum for each year group.

These strands include: 

• Language in the Science Classroom: a project with RZSS Edinburgh Zoo for S4-6 German learners, creating learning resources, translating maps, recording sound files and much more.
• S3 Languages in Science Conference, which brought in partners from science backgrounds who talked of the influence language learning has had on their careers, as well as how they use their languages from day to day. This conference introduced learners to new careers as well as to the idea that you don’t have to leave Midlothian for a language to be useful and necessary.
• S2 Visits; world of work visitors during Languages Week we invited a number of visitors for our S2. They loved the opportunity to hear from people in the world of work. We had a young engineer from BAE who raved about his year abroad in Germany as well as Serge and Maire from Edinburgh university who spoke about the more personal benefits of language learning. 

We are delighted to award Beeslack Community High School a GOLD Scottish Languages Employability Award – congratulations! This is an outstanding submission which builds strongly on their previous Bronze award. The verification panel loved the department’s reflection on the school’s planned status as a science academy and their subsequent proactive and positive response; this is highly commendable and would be an inspirational model for other schools. Their interdisciplinary work goes beyond STEM too, in the journalism project with their faculty partners in English. This whole-school integration of languages and employability is exemplary.  

The verification panel were also extremely impressed by the Employability calendar devised by the school; this is an excellent way to illustrate the ongoing DYW-related activities organised by the department. All in all, this is an incredibly strong and ground-breaking submission – well done again, Team Beeslack