Employment

Broughton High School continues their strong tradition of promoting languages and employability, having previous involvement with the SCILT Business Languages Champions scheme and having been awarded a previous Gold Scottish Languages Employability Award in 2020.

The four different projects in this submission are a mix of new and long-standing partnerships. 

St James Quarter

This new partnership arose as a result of Covid and enabled engagement with a new local development. The St James Quarter Tourism Manager visited the school and talked to pupils about the importance of Chinese tourists to the Scottish economy and her role in attracting tourists to the St James Quarter.

Visit Scotland

In this long-standing partnership with Visit Scotland, the link person visited all S1 pupils remotely to discuss the services offered by Visit Scotland, the services provided by the icentre in Edinburgh and job opportunities available with the company, including those requiring languages.  Pupils then asked her questions in Spanish and English.

In addition, an S6 pupil working towards the SQA Languages Baccalaureate investigated the importance of Chinese tourism to Edinburgh and Scotland. He linked with another member of staff from Visit Scotland, and interviewed her on the topic in Mandarin.

Social Bite, Superlogo and Happy Smile

The school routinely undertakes an employability project as part of the level 4 languages for Life and Work award in S4.  This involves creating a class company to develop, market and sell a project.  Valuable business and employability skills are learned and the product always has a language theme.  This year they sold notebooks and tote bags, learned about Social Enterprise and visited the Social Bite café in Rose Street.  Profits from the business are given to Social Bite.

Former Pupils using language for work or travel

The faculty at Broughton runs a Celebration of Languages week at the start of October every year, reflecting and celebrating the fact that their students come from diverse backgrounds and speak over 50 languages.  This year 5 former students created short videos on how they have used their languages and these were shown to all S4-6 students in order to inspire them to do amazing things with languages themselves.

We congratulate Broughton High School once again on their outstanding work in linking languages and employability! This is an exemplary submission, demonstrating an on-going ethos of positive language learning in school and an appreciation of the value of languages in life and work by pupils and staff.

The projects outlined here build successfully on previous partnerships and the school has adapted creatively to the restrictions placed by Covid through online visits, and a change of partner from Balmoral to St James’ Quarter, harnessing the potential of such a new development, to present another highly organised, seamless and clearly effective set of projects which link together to engage and inform learners at all stages and levels, right up to Baccalaureate level. Previous students sharing their workplace experiences with S4-S6 students also makes for powerful, meaningful connections, and the positive impact of all of this on learners is evident.

This submission exemplifies effective partnership working between a school (and its wider community) and various local businesses to support the development of employability skills and languages, and on the basis of all this we are delighted to award Broughton High School their second GOLD Scottish Languages Employability award.

As Broughton High School has now been awarded a second successive Gold Award, we are also delighted to be able to designate the school as a Platinum Languages and Employability Partner, the first school in Scotland to reach this achievement. Congratulations Broughton!