Employment

Chryston High School’s project incorporated a number of different elements. These were: 

• The Global Work Place - Otto Graf Realschule, Heidelberg: an S3/4 project developed around employability in an international context. Learners submit an application form including their motivation for applying and have to complete a section in German. Learners who wish to go to Germany have to go through an interview with a panel; they are marked against a set of criteria and are then selected to go on the trip. This project also involves comparing the job market in Scotland and Germany, and culminates with a trip to Germany where learners visit companies in the local area with their partner and job shadow for a morning. They also visit Bewerbungstraining - SAP, Walldorf where they learn about the role of technology for business in past, present and future, including Virtual Reality and AI. They then attend workshops on writing CVs for the German job market where there is a stress on the importance of learning German and how to prepare for interview. The group then take part in one of two workshops. One focusses on writing business plans and marketing a product and the other looks at coding and programming. A reciprocal visit to Scotland also takes place.  
  
  
• Work Experience - Goethe Institut, Glasgow: S6  
  
  
• Leadership in Primary Languages - Auchinloch Primary School; Chryston Primary School; Gartcosh Primary School; Glenmanor Primary School; Stepps Primary School; Goethe Institut, Glasgow with S6 learners undertaking a leadership qualification through the Modern Languages department. They prepared lessons to aid with the transition with local primary schools. Over a 10-week period, learners went to a local primary school and delivered German lessons under the supervision of the class teacher. This had many advantages for the young people, including using their language in context, developing their soft skills and working collaboratively to produce common materials to aid teaching and learning in the primary school.  It also helped with the transition between secondary and primary.  
  

• Board Game on the Nubian Giraffe - Royal Zoological Society Scotland, with S4 employability ambassadors and AH learners, who created a boardgame with the RZSS on the Nubian giraffe in German to support learning in the primary school.  
  
  
• Language Transition - Heriot Watt University, working with Heriot Watt and their recruitment team at language promotion and transition work to help recruit linguists. 
  
  
• Skills Framework - Skills Development Scotland, designing a common skills framework and creating multilingual digital badges to show the skills used in  classwork activities, so that pupils are more aware of the skills that they are using and so that they can better articulate their own skillset.   

This is an excellent submission which fully deserves a GOLD award – congratulations!   

The verification panel were very enthusiastic and highly complimentary about so many aspects of this submission. Among other things, they loved the varied and wide-ranging activities involving learners at all stages and levels, the focus on improving gender balance, the P7 transition work and S6 doing the Leadership Award through teaching languages. The word ‘powerhouse’ was also used! Huge well done to both Chryston High School, and to the associated primary schools involved too. It would be encouraging for them to know that the Leadership in Primary Languages initiative formed part of the evidence for this successful submission, and that this could form a part of their own potential Scottish Languages Employability Award submission in the future!  

Another area of potential future development is Spanish; this features in one or two of the projects shown in the submission and a future expansion of the school’s work in embedding DYW in languages could be the increase of Spanish projects, either by involving Spanish in some existing projects or by developing new Spanish-specific ones.   

Well done again on an example of genuine embedding of employability skills throughout the languages curriculum. Your work on this is exemplary.