Employment

Primary 2a at Our Lady of the Rosary Primary School are the key drivers of this project. They set themselves up as a Language Ambassadors Committee at the start of the session and their activities throughout the year consisted of the following: 

• Discussing and researching jobs where languages are used 
• Creating a survey to find out how many languages were spoken across the school. This included Arabic, Urdu, Mandarin, Polish, and Turkish.   
• Voting on ‘Language of the Month’ where they learned about the country and some phrases in the Language. They worked with Primary 7 to learn an Irish song from their teacher, and with another class to learn Mandarin.  
• Making posters to raise awareness across the school of European Languages Day on 26th September.   
• Working with Primary 7 to introduce Languages Week Scotland and to use SCILT resources to promote jobs using languages to learners and parents 

All of this culminated in a project with CIBO Deli. They provided a specially designed menu, together with key phrases in the language. Using these the class created their own Italian menus and enacted role play situations in their playroom sessions to practise the language further and develop their understanding of using languages in the workplace.   

The whole verification team loved everything about this submission, and congratulated the class, their teacher, CIBO Deli, and the other classes that were involved in the activities described in this wonderful submission.  

Their Language Ambassadors Committe pledge sums up exactly what the Scottish Languages Employability award is all about: ‘We aim to promote languages within our school and community to show that learning a language is fun, valuable and worthwhile.’  

The activities that were carried out during the year were exemplary in achieving this aim, introducing learners to a range of languages and cultures, sharing their learning meaningfully, and applying it in a real-life scenario.  

The majority of the work in this submission was undertaken most ably by class P2a, which would normally qualify for a Bronze Award. However, the verification team felt that through the collaboration with P7 in learning Irish and during Languages Week Scotland, and the taster sessions for P1-4, the work of P2a involved and impacted others in the wider school community and for this reason that it merited a Silver award.