Transcript of WoLLoW webinar: 16th May 2024

John Wilson
Welcome to this WoLLoW (World of Language, Language of the World) webinar. Our purpose is to focus on where and how WoLLoW is being used in three different contexts. We hope that this will be useful. If you’re already using it, you may find other ways of using it and enhancing your use and, obviously, if you’re not using it, you can think about how it might work for you. I’m going to hand over, first, to Steffan Griffiths who is the Head at Norwich School and is also one of the co-founders of WoLLoW. He is going to introduce what we’re all about.

Steffan Griffiths
Thanks, John. This will be a whistle-stop tour of how we got here. What was the issue that we were dealing with? It started as a languages and linguistics challenge. The departments of English, MFL and Classics are all under pressure in particular ways and we were thinking about how to help all three of those faculty areas against pressure from STEM and creativity and other subjects. We were also conscious of the difficulties of transition from Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3, whether in independent or state schools, with the work done in primary schools being lost as pupils moved from primary to secondary. And, without wishing to make this a political address, what might be described as the dead hand of SATS was also in our minds and how we might challenge that. We wanted to try to address these issues and help our young people in those areas. So, we set about devising resources to reinject a sense of fun and a sense of curiosity, thinking about and making connections between languages.
Through the work of Abbie Dean at Norwich School, in particular, but also John Wilson at Cheadle Hulme School, and John Claughton, we have created a full set of materials for Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 and you will hear from others more about those resources. The resources provide a complete curriculum, but it is possible to pick and mix. You don’t have to do the whole thing. You can take the bits out that suit you. It has also been devised so it can be delivered by non-specialists. There is nobody who can learn everything across Classics and English and modern languages and other areas of the curriculum. WoLLoW injects a spirit of curiosity and discovery for teachers as well as pupils. So, it is definitely delivered in a way that you don’t have to be an expert.
So, WoLLoW started as a languages project, but I’d pick out three areas where we’ve had unintended consequences which we think increase the benefits of WoLLoW and you are going to hear some case studies around them this afternoon. The first of them is EAL, the celebration of the bilingual pupil, allowing the voice that sometimes is marginalised in classrooms to become central, allowing these boys and girls to become stars of the show. The second is SEND and the accessibility of the WoLLoW approach for people with additional needs. And the third is the natural interweaving of PSHE strands into WoLLoW lessons and then out of WoLLoW lessons into other areas of the curriculum. This comes naturally from the approach that we are adopting.
So, a summary of the benefits might be, first, languages and literacy: we think WoLLoW gives technical support and a curiosity around languages that makes pupils want to learn them. Second, there is a broader celebration of diversity and inclusion and, third, interdisciplinarity, the connection between languages and other areas in the curriculum. They have been the major strands of the WoLLoW approach.
Finally, a very quick summary of where we are and where we’re heading. We are an independent charity. We have our origins in particular schools but our aim is very much to share what we are doing as widely as possible. Part of that involves us reviewing what we have done, reviewing the resources and how best they can be disseminated. You early adopters out there are very good news for us, and we hope that this seminar helps to spread the WoLLoW message a little bit further. We’re also looking to use the research community to give validity to our practice, particularly around the area of assessment but also to endorse the WoLLoW practice. We’re all teachers and we all have a hunch that this works. Our experience is that it does work, and it is greatly enjoyed by the pupils that we teach. However, we know that we need to show impact measurement in order to persuade others. I will finish there. That’s a very quick tour of where we are, where we have been and, hopefully, where we’re going. I hope you enjoy the rest of the time and I think the most exciting thing you will be hearing about are the case studies and how this is actually working in schools.

John Wilson
Thank you, Steffan. I am now going to turn to Soofia Amin. She is the Assistant Head of Kensington Primary School and is a promoter of a multilingual approach to teaching in her school.

Soofia Amin
Thank you. Abbie, if I get a bit passionate when I’m talking and I lose track of time, please just give me a nudge.

John Wilson
Passion is encouraged, Soofia.

Soofia Amin
So, my name is Soofia Amin. I’m an Assistant Head at Kensington Primary. We’re a primary school in Newham, east London, three form entry, so we have around 650 pupils and about 50 languages. We have a very high mobility rate at Kensington Primary through the nature of the borough. Parents and families move here and move on quite quickly, so we have children joining us multiple times throughout the year. Already this week I think we’ve had six children joining us this week and last week we had about eight children. That is a strength because we have all these languages joining the school but also there’s the challenge: how do we assimilate them quickly and help them access the curriculum, whilst at the same time getting the best out of their languages?
Here’s a bit of context about how we started using WoLLoW. Before COVID, we launched our own curriculum at Kensington. We were delivering the National Curriculum, but we were also doing a lot of additional things for our children because of the nature of our community. Some of our children have been born and brought up here, but most of our children are migrants. They live in shared accommodation and their parents might be working long hours. So, we were doing lots of additional things with them that they needed. I had a teacher at the time in the leadership team who set about creating a new curriculum which was more effective so that we were teaching in a way that was better for our community. We launched the curriculum in 2019 and then COVID hit.
Here’s a brief summary of that curriculum. We have English, Maths, and Science and Technology as our Academic curriculum. And we have a Health curriculum, so physical health is as important as Maths and English and the children have those lessons every single day. We have Emotional Health as part of that and we teach this in lessons and we also teach about regulation. We have a Communication curriculum which is equal in weight and then we have a Culture curriculum which encompasses geography and history. What has been nice about having our own curriculum is that we have been adapting it as we go along. We have ownership over it and it works for our community. We did have Ofsted two years ago and, thankfully, we were still outstanding. We had to prove that our curriculum was delivering better than the National Curriculum for our community. So, imagine: we have children coming in multiple times throughout the year, throughout the week, and then, as their MFL provision, they were learning Mandarin once a week for half an hour. It wasn’t being taught very well or they were doing the best that they could. Then we have these same children with their own languages coming in trying to learn English at the same time. So, we took the brave approach of promoting all languages. That was the vision that we will promote all languages at Kensington, but how do I promote all languages in a school and how does that look? I couldn’t find anybody else who was doing it. We started doing a lot of work in CPD with staff about what it might look like. Then we started to unpick our approaches to languages.

There are lots of things we say around languages which are negative:
‘She’s new to English, she has nothing.’
‘This child doesn’t understand the lesson. I think he has needs.’
‘He’s making slow progress as he has two different languages at home.
‘Mum and dad, you need to make sure you speak to them in English at home.’ ‘I don’t know what to do with him. He has no English.’
Whether we mean it or not, we are sending a negative message to families, communities and children about English. We found that EAL had a bit of a negative connotation. With EAL, we’re kind of saying that English is missing that there’s no language, that there’s a lack of academic skills, a lack of education, a lack of vocabulary. Something’s broken and needs fixing.
A multilingual approach is more an asset-based approach to languages, so languages have an equal status. Children are bringing all their linguistic repertoire, so they are seen as having unique skills. Actually, it didn’t happen on purpose: the leadership team didn’t turn around and say, ‘Okay we’re having a multilingual approach.’ It happened naturally when we started learning about it and working with universities and research staff themselves. I remember a conversation with a member of staff who said that she didn’t feel comfortable talking about EAL in this way. We can’t say we celebrate languages and then say we have EAL children. So, how do we go to multilingualism as a full school approach? We have a shared vision. So, it’s in the leadership team, staff, governors, parents, children. Everybody needs to understand the vision and buy into it. Effective CPD is important, sharing pedagogy and research and sharing best practice with staff continuously, and updating our practice, adapting, responding to the needs of a pupil and the demands of the curriculum, engaging with all stakeholders. This is all being developed all the time and updated every year. In 2022 it became part of our school development plan and part of our curriculum. We quite quickly realised that multilingualism was much stronger than we realised. It was bringing a much clearer message and there was so much we could do as a whole school when it came to multilingualism. We got parents involved and we were working with the university last year on a multilingual story time. As part of this, we developed the curriculum with multilingualism. How do we do that? We added multilingualism, identity and languages into the curriculum. Teachers use this in topics and subjects that lend themselves to it and we use first languages to expand understanding of vocabulary and to explain and compare grammars. So, children from abroad, especially when it comes to Years 4, 5 and 6 are accessing lessons with their home language while they’re learning English. And the use of other lessons using multilingualism contributes to this.
We launched WoLLoW in 2023 as part of this. We have two curriculum areas where we use WoLLoW. We have the Emotional Health curriculum and multilingualism goes into that and we put it into the Communication Curriculum, promoting first languages. So, ‘We are multilingual’ WAMCAM is in the Emotional Health Curriculum and WoLLoW has been placed into our Communication Curriculum. So, languages are present in both, but the languages and Emotional Health Curriculum is more based on belonging and identity. In the Communication Curriculum, promoting first languages, it’s about how languages work, and the history of languages and all the other knowledge that WoLLoW brings with it. The last thing that we hope children take from all of this is that they use all their languages. What we want is an approach for all children to use their languages as they are learning and they’re proud of it and they’re able to navigate learning using their own linguistic repertoires.
So, from Year 1 to Year 6 we use WoLLoW and we called it promoting first languages, so we’ve called it PFL instead of MFL. And here’s a picture of how a lesson looks, and some work in a book and that’s a display in Year 1. What we’ve done in Year 1 and Year 2 is go back to WoLLoW and I’ve created more communication-style lessons, how we use our hands for meaning, sounds and how sounds carry, with body language and then we’ve kind of put in a few sounds in different languages. This month we’ve been having multilingual May. We’ve had loads of events happening and PFL and WoLLoW were part of this. Last week we had ‘Learn with your child’ workshops. We taught parents how we teach PFL using WoLLoW. We did it across the school from Year 1 to Year 6. Parents came in and we had a workshop on what we do and then we showed them lessons with their children. We bring their children down and they join in a lesson. So, Year 4, 5 and 6 parents had a lesson with their children in the main hall on Sanskrit, Hindi and Urdu through WoLLoW. Year 1 did a lesson on phonic sounds. They matched sounds and then they did in their own sounds with their parents. In Year 2, they did the days of the week in different languages. The parents did a presentation and joined in with their children, creating something. And in Year 3 they were ready to do measurement in Maths, so they used the home language to create rulers. We thought that was really lovely.
What did the parents learn from these sessions? One said, ‘We speak daily in Telugu but never thought of telling our child the Telugu numbers. This is a thought-provoking session.’ Another, ‘How important it is to promote our first language. I understand now that my child doesn’t know how to write in Romanian. I will try to change it this.’ I just love this response. ‘It showed the importance of celebrating and engaging with non-English languages spoken at home in the school curriculum, not just from other ideological perspective, but from an academic one. It is fascinating to learn how children from multi-language backgrounds actually perform better in secondary level exams than those who identify as monolingual children.’
It was great having those parents engaged with us and having them asking questions and realising that their own language is fantastic, that they need to be using it to promote their own child’s learning. A whole school approach to multilingualism has a real impact: a child in Year 4 said she was going to go to the after-school club to learn different languages. Another said, “Going to Romanian Club -after school – has made me so proud of where I was from. It made me so happy in school.” A child in Year 6 said ‘I never knew that having another language mattered for me. It’s actually amazing what I can do in Italian.’ And a parent from India said ‘I thought you would tell us that we should be speaking English at home. I was really worried because I’m learning it, too. Teaching in Urdu I can do. I feel so relieved and proud that you would recognise our language at school.’

John Wilson
Thank you very much – we just about got away with the tech. We’re going to move swiftly to another context now. This is Rachel Quick who is the Principal of the Wherry School. This is an autism specialist school in in Norwich. We also welcome Lauren Nesbitt who teaches WoLLoW at the Wherry School.

Rachel Quick
As John said, I’m the principal of the Wherry School and the CEO of the Wherry School Trust. We are a specialist school for autistic young people that goes from 4 to 19. As a school, we are very different from the vast majority of special sector schools. Our children are those who are working and learning on a mainstream curriculum with a GCSE pathway as an aspiration for our students. The vast majority have come to us because of a significant breakdown in the relationships in their current settings. They all have all an autism diagnosis, and we know that that a significant aspect of that is around communication disorder with high levels of anxiety. That has often been the reason why we’ve had to sort of issues around behaviour, school-based distress and the avoidance of learning. The children do have the potential to become independent learners and then they can become independent and successful adults. However, along the way, their ability to cope within a mainstream setting has been the barrier to learning. We’ve got children who then fall out of education either into elective Home Ed or they’re going to schools that say they can no longer meet their needs. So, we have a dual purpose: to support the young people with recognising who they are as autistic learners, and to help them to understand their own personal regulation, to control their anxiety and distress, and, secondly, to support them with essentially meeting a need: they want to learn and this is the important thing for our young people. Schools and mainstream schools which want to support and work with young people to will often reduce the amount of time that a child is in school and so what we end up with is a set of young people who want to learn but actually that entitlement has been removed, often because of their behaviours.
Our vision is the highest quality education and support for young people with autism – i.e. with social communication imagination, communication and interaction disorders – but equally to create young people who are successful citizens of not just Norwich or Norfolk – which has its own issues as a white monoculture, although this is changing – and to be able to learn and to enjoy learning about a wider world and a wider environment. So, we have young people who have had a very fractured education prior to joining our school. They are very angry young people, who do not want to be in school and that sort of negativity extends to their view of the role of teachers and peers and there is an unmet need. So, we have a dual curriculum, a bit like Soofia’s school. We mirror the main National Curriculum to an extent, but we also have an autism curriculum that celebrates a young person being autistic. We look at their EHCPs and other information and it’s such a deficit-based model, as if we were trying to create a ‘normal’ young person. So, the current EHCP model is often about removing what a child is and who they are, so that they fit within an accepted view of what education is. Therefore, people will place a one-to-one support around a child and thereby lose completely the independence of a young person as a learner. Our curriculum provides the opportunities to understand and learn, to regulate, to deal with distress, to take complete control and agency in their learning.
Alongside all those aspects, one of the things for a young person to be successful moving forward is to gain the sort of qualifications that they need for the next stage of their learning, their career and life. One of the things that we really aspired to when we set up the school was around this concept of the EBacc and why we have ended up with WoLLoW is that we have reached a situation whereby we’ve got young people who are increasingly confident, independent learners but children who, through fear and disengagement, have a very negative attitude towards certain subjects. One of those was MFL subjects and we had very little engagement with GCSEs. So, introducing WoLLoW was really about cultural education. What can we really do to move children on and to change their views. In MFL, we’ve got fear and anxiety around learning. We’ve got disordered communication as an aspect of the autism disorder which is a significant barrier for these young people. We needed to find some way just to celebrate languages and, like other schools, we came to WoLLoW. We thought about a structure that staff can work with. And what can we do with that structure? Abbie has been to visit us and we have made significant changes in approach because we wanted to find opportunities to embed and contextualise other learning, to work cooperatively, to give agency and autonomy to a child within their learning. We saw that the WoLLoW approach was a phenomenal way of doing this. Lauren is going to talk about it, but it allows our children to explore, to take their intense, personal interests and to become explorers whilst learning about languages. We first refer to it as a sort of like an Odyssey and we’re going out on an adventure. We are going to really enjoy all these areas. Lauren is going to talk about a Key Stage 3 class, but we run our KS3 Year 7 class as a primary class.

Lauren Nesbitt
We deliver WoLLoW from year 7 to year 9. In terms of presenting their work and to help the students to work collaboratively and reduce some of that pressure on the individual, we decided to have students not with their own individual workbook, but to have this floor book. It’s essentially like a scrapbook and then each year that class will then take their floor book up to the new class. So, you can see the progress that the students have made and again it’s a nice way to be creative, to display their work through photographs, Post-it notes, worksheets and quotes. I feel that when French or another language was delivered, it might be quite worksheet heavy. Our students voiced that they wanted to be a bit more creative. We want to capture those moments of young people just purely having joy and being able to photograph those precious memories. So, we found that the floor book has been successful. It takes that ownership away from the young person and at the start of each lesson the floor book is out, so the children can then look back on the work. They remember what they did in cookery last week or what they learned about this or that language. It’s nice because it’s helping them to have conversations with each other and also work collaboratively. We have adapted how WoLLoW is delivered for our learners in Year 7 just to help them with their social skills and their communication and understanding other. We look at what languages mean to them, looking at different accents from around the world just exposing them to people from different countries. Then I think a lot of them enjoyed looking at how they are multicultural themselves, the food they like, the film, the music, TV that actually comes from all around the world. And then we move on to a module about communicating without talking, looking at ways in which we interact through using of sign language. We’ve got some Braille out as well. And for some of our students being selective mute, it gives them a chance to be able to learn a bit more about themselves potentially or how they communicate and for the other students to be able to communicate successfully with them.
A lot of the content that we deliver is specifically around the students’ interest. They can then explore around their own interests as well. One of the projects we allow the students to do is to research a culture of their choice and look at the language, the food, different locations and tourist attractions. Some of them might want to go on holiday to a particular place or are going, and they’re feeling quite anxious about it, and this gives them that exposure. Then towards the end of year 7 we look at different foods around the world and introduce some cookery into the lesson. For some of our students with their sensory needs or perhaps their fears, this is a way in which gives them that opportunity to try those different foods, explore them in a relaxed environment. We use other resources in all our lessons to help really immerse the young person. We use LYFTA – https://www.lyfta.com/ – which is a website that has so many fantastic different clips of what it’s like to live in a particular place. You’ve got the sounds, the people within that environment. So, we’ve taught a lesson on food around the world and how food is cooked in an Afghanistan bakery. The students are able to see inside the bakery, hear the sounds and try to visualise what it’s like to live in that environment. This helps them to develop their theory of mind and try to understand what it’s like for another person. Immersing them in that video is one successful tool to do that. Then we use things like YouTube, getting the maps out from the classroom, giving them that opportunity to learn collaboratively. And our students do love a quiz, too, so we need to try and put in some quizzes. I’ve just got the next few slides capturing their learning, getting the maps out, translating different words and then adding those to the maps. We’ve got an image of a student doing some sign language and then we look at non- verbal communication and the different ways that we communicate. The child with the playing card was having to communicate the number on their card without using words, just using their body language. That’s a real hurdle that some of these students have to overcome and so equipping them with lessons where it’s not focusing just on verbal language but also on body language as well is a way of helping to meet their needs. Then the last slide has some of them doing some cookery, and again some more of the maps and some food tasting in those lessons.

Rachel Quick
Just very quickly to put it all together again, essentially what we found with WoLLoW is simple the engagement of the young people, the excitement. We can cover so many other aspects of our autism curriculum through WoLLoW within an area, MFL, that was actually previously a challenge. We see them building strong relationships, developing their social imagination, all those areas in which we would really want to be supporting a young autistic learner. And this year we’re absolutely all delighted that we have now got a GCSE language cohort starting again in September. So, we have challenged what learning can be in a classroom and we have removed one of the obstacles in learning languages, the fear of being wrong or the fear of speaking. We’ve moved it from a fear-based approach where people are so worried, to just enjoyment and laughter. I think for us that’s the most important thing.

John Wilson
Thank you, Rachel and Lauren. That was really interesting. I move now to my own school, Cheadle Hulme. An all-through school, junior and secondary, although perhaps we don’t see enough of each other. I am going to hand over to Vincent and Rebecca, who is the modern language specialist teacher, and Vincent, who is the Head of the Junior School. It is really good to have representation from SLT from various schools. It shows how seriously people are taking this. Vincent is the Head of the Junior School and he joined us from an international school, which really helped fuel the interest in internationalism and languages at Cheadle Hulme.

Vincent Weightman
We’re at Cheadle Hulme Junior School. We’re a two-form entry, academically selective, independent primary school. We’ve got about 350 kids including a pre-school. I’d worked internationally for 11 years, and I picked up Russian, so my language acquisition came at age 25, have dodged it for the 15 years of education. In my very first meeting when I joined the school, John and Rebecca were basically saying they didn’t think we should teach French anymore, despite the fact that lots of our parents go skiing somewhere in Europe. So, I didn’t immediately understand how we could evidence impact through WoLLoW and I had a few questions and concerns. So, hopefully, I can you some information and possibly some ammunition to take to your SLT because I’ve found it really positive. I’ll speak very briefly about my perspective and let Rebecca talk about how it works at the school. Soofia mentioned the long-term vision and commitment and I think that was a big thing. I didn’t want the kids to come through the school in Cheshire, only knowing what happened within the school gates. So, this is a long-term vision and commitment to preparing students for the globalised world they’re going to live in. So, we’ve enhanced that global confidence and we’ve promoted cultural awareness, whether that’s directly within classrooms or more broadly across our community. We’ve got kids travelling all over the world and we want them to feel that this is relevant to their education. WoLLoW is also enhancing that sort of academic excellence, the thinking process. The easiest sell in the world is the fact that our children have increased their levels of academic performance. It’s that knowledge iceberg: because we are talking about languages in a much richer way, because we’re exploring more languages in lots of different ways, English comprehension is increased. Obviously, post- COVID the reading skills are on their knees and I feel the introduction of WoLLoW has really stimulated and boosted our pupils’ attainment across other subjects beyond the language that we’ve worked on. Also, the innovative teaching makes a difference and Rebecca will talk through evidence of that impact. I think we’re in a position where it really is working and it really aligns with that student-centred approach, getting kids to reflect on their learning, getting kids to think about what they’ve learned and how it affects what they’re about to learn next, how it crosses over across different subjects.

I’ve found it has had a positive impact on our academics beyond language and then finally there’s the impact on community engagement. I was really fortunate to work in international schools for 11 years and I got to see what it was like to have 65 nationalities. Every kid in every family was really proud of where they’ve come from. We don’t want them to be beaten down, like that whack a mole: ‘We speak English here. You’re here to speak English.’ So, to come into this environment, it was just fantastic to have a platform to open up to our community because we had loads of kids who were second language English speakers, but they were scared to write it down and parents were scared to admit it. That meant we couldn’t effectively support their learning or embrace everything about them. We’re also seeing it in a sort of human, personal level and again. Rebecca does the passion and enthusiasm far better than me, but we’ve got lots of stories of all the different children who were just a little bit reserved and didn’t want to say certain things and didn’t want to do certain things. The more we’ve introduced WoLLoW, the more we’ve introduced things to go alongside WoLLoW, the more these kids have come out their shells. We’ll get children, in assemblies and Head’s challenges, exploring lots of different things much more confidently.
So, I just wanted to give a bit of ammunition for people to take away to their school. Rebecca will do a lot more on how it’s been implemented and how it’s been so effective.

Rebecca Fox-Partridge
I just wanted to mention Soofia because she used the word passion and I think, as linguists, we are passionate but, outside of that community, a lot of people think we’re very academic, very staid. A lot of other educators live in fear because of the knowledge that we have and, if we’re not there for a lesson, the other teachers will worry, ‘Do I have to teach them? Do I have to speak a language?’ I think the more that we’ve opened it up within our school and said that you are valued and your knowledge is valued, the better it has been. We have over 30 languages spoken at CHS within the pupils and the staff and, when we wanted to launch WoLLoW, staff were doubtful and I had staff come into me and say, ‘What? I speak Urdu? Is it really interesting to talk to the children about my culture? How is it valuable?’ And you can see that they now feel valued, no matter the extent of their knowledge. Now, when I’m teaching, quite often teachers are in and out of lessons and now they’re at the point where they can input as well because this is really interesting.
Quite often, as educators, you’re in the classroom by yourself and I was really lucky to work alongside John for a year in Year 6, and John and I both had that passion and we had stories and our team teaching was phenomenal. I remember him asking me whether I was interested in WoLLoW. And I was saying ‘You’re kidding me. It’s just phenomenal. This is what this school needs. We need to bring this in.’ Previously, languages were taught in the junior school by worksheets. This was unbelievable. As linguistic educators, you know that children hear it first and then they begin to understand it within their brains, then they begin to converse and then they begin to read it and then, finally, they begin to write it. So, why in primary education are we asking children to record on a piece of paper from the Twinkle website, ‘Fill in those words.’ ‘What are the days of the week?’ I’m totally opposed to that. As I tell the pupils frequently, I work exclusively on whiteboards because I don’t want them to have the pressure of writing it wrong, having a fear of not setting it out properly. We work on whiteboards and the way that I collect evidence is to go round and photograph it. When they’re speaking, I will video for each class and then, for each class, that goes on the system and everybody can access it. So, for example, in EYFS, they have learning logs and some of the teachers have printed photographic evidence off. It’s about working collaboratively with the pupils we have. Pupils in the junior school are now really eager to share their knowledge.
Recently, because we’re close to central Manchester, we’ve had quite a lot of children who have been coming from Hong Kong, so they speak Mandarin and Cantonese. They’re quite withdrawn and, in the structure of their working day, they’re used to just writing, responding only when asked. One of my pupils was very quiet and was doubtful and we were learning fruits at the time and some of the other children who speak Russian or Mandarin, within the body of that French lesson, we were discussing other languages and he put his hand up and he said, ‘Is it okay if I teach you in Cantonese, how to write it in Cantonese and how to say it ?’ He was shaking with fear, but for me he’d crossed that barrier because WoLLoW had lent itself to that. For me, that is a passionate moment in teaching. Every day I come out of the classroom and I think ‘This is why I am a linguistic educator, because I am using the children to educate me. I think that is really, really important and they’re now getting into the aspect of using questioning and using the proper language. The other day I was in a pre-school French lesson, so the children were three. We were doing colours. We looked at the colour blue and one of the children said to me that that sounds like English. And I thought right here we go and I said, ‘Do you know what those words are called, the ones that sound like English but they’re in French?’ I said, ‘It’s called a cognate.’ Then the following week I went back in and we looked at orange and they put their hands up, ‘That’s a cognate. It’s a cognate, isn’t it? At three years old. So, if we’re teaching them from that early on, when they get into the senior school, they’re going to know that language and that is significant from being very, very young and that those are the moments that are really, truly special.
We celebrate various aspects so throughout the school. We celebrate the European Day of Languages and last year we had a huge event on the Sunday. It was – it’s a very long title – ‘The cultural diversity for dialogue and development.’ which is a UNESCO day and at Cheadle Hume we shouldn’t it down to ‘Multicultural CHS’ and this was an event where the whole community came together to celebrate it. There was lots of planning and the day turned out to be monumental. We had guest speakers, including Leonie Gaiser from Manchester University, who spoke about multilingualism in Manchester. We had Zahid Hussain. If you get chance, please go on YouTube and watch the poem ‘Made in Manchester’ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xylJAYrEpY] because that poem is just brilliant and it shows how many children within the centre of Manchester are using their language to empower themselves. So, we had Bhangra dancing, flamenco, Bollywood. Everybody who attended wore traditional costume, so we had saris. We had a parent who had brought in her wedding dress from her traditional wedding. And she said, ‘Why would anyone want to see this? We also had a human library where people could go in and say ‘I speak Polish or Russian. Talk to me. What would you like to know? We had a parent that taught the community about how to tie their turban and to ask questions. His son for the first time had worn his turban to school and, the next day, the parent came to see me and said that was the longest time his son had ever worn his turban at Cheadle Hulme School, and had wanted to wear it. He said, ‘It is significant to us as parents and we cannot thank the school and WoLLoW enough for promoting language in a positive light.’
I think that’s the way forward we need to be positive with language and to say to children, ‘What you have is a gift and it’s really, really special and please share that with us.’ I sent a questionnaire out to the Year 6s because they have gone all the way through now and there were quite a few questions on it but one of the questions was asking them to self-reflect , ‘What are the challenges of learning another language?’ and they opened up and they said you have to stick to it when you’re finding it hard to learn, don’t stop’. If we can inspire children to pick up languages at such an early age then when they get to the senior school, they’re not going to drop it. They’re going to want to take a GCSE in it, they’re going to want to take an A level in it. They’re going to be interested.
And just one final fact that I want to say I have run extra-curricular language clubs for a long time and I started to run a Japanese club and I don’t speak Japanese so I’m working alongside the children and we have come together as learners. They can see that I’m learning. They’re teaching me. We’re learning together and it’s such an enjoyable experience and if, as linguists, every day it’s enjoyable then you are winning hands down. I am so passionate and if anybody that wants to come to Cheadle Hume School and observe any of our lessons, we’d be absolutely delighted to have you and show you around. On the CHS website you can access multicultural CHS and have a look at the photographs: https://www.cheadlehulmeschool.co.uk/news/multicultural-chs-day-celebrations/.

John Wilson
Thanks, Vincent and Rebecca – plenty of passion there. I’ll now turn to Abbie Dean to talk about the details of the resources and then John Claughton, another co-founder, to give his perspective.

Abbie Dean
We have created the course for key stage 2 and key stage 3. For every single lesson there is a PowerPoint, there is a worksheet and there is a teacher’s crib sheet to help you with the answers and give you a bit of background information. You can access the resources by emailing me or go on the WoLLoW website – https://theworldoflanguages.co.uk/ – and the website is being updated. You will see there’s a button to request resources that comes through to me and I will send them all to you. The resources are free. At Norwich School. we teach it from Year 3 to Year 6 and then further on into the senior school, Years 7 and 8. You can choose lessons, you can pick the bits you like. You do not have to run all the way through. Do the bits you fancy, cherry pick to what suits your learners, your teachers and your curriculum.
I think what’s lovely this evening is to hear how schools are using it differently and that it’s inspired them to add to their curriculum, in terms of after school clubs, in terms of different approaches to the different subjects in the classroom. So, it really is a starter to open up your curriculum to think about language and literacy and making connections.

John Claughton
Steffan and I taught Classics together a long, long time ago, but it’s seven and a half years since we had our first conversation, as he described, talking about co-ordinating languages at Norwich School. But when I hear the things that people have talked about today, we never could have dreamt that what we were talking about then would turn out to be so important. When you listen to Rachel and Soofia and to the Cheadle Hulme staff, you see an extraordinary passion, but also you see that the learning of languages is not just a corner of the curriculum disregarded by OFSTED. Rather, we’re talking about fundamental issues to do with the identity of individuals, the pride of parents in their own heritage. We’re talking, in the end about community coherence, where people feel that they belong in this country and yet can be proud of their own past. We’re talking about encouraging kids to really enjoy languages and for the teachers and the kids to explore together. And so, in the end I find it truly exhilarating.

John Wilson
If anyone does have specific questions on the resources, do get in touch with us. Similarly, if you’re wondering whether there is a WoLLoW school near you, get in touch. And you are very welcome to come to see WoLLoW at work in Norwich or Cheadle Hulme.

John Claughton
Just a bit of advertising. In the last few months been producing a sort of prospectus and we’ll be sharing this both in paper form and electronically. It might be useful document to share with senior leadership teams. I’d also like to say that we are working productively with universities and with some key figures. I do believe that the new NCLE organisation and the DfE and others do see that WoLLoW is something which addresses many of their concerns. We will continue to advocate, in the nicest possible way, that the whole world should teach WoLLoW, not that we’ve got carried away with ourselves.

John Wilson
Julie has a hand raised: ‘I currently teach Spanish in an independent primary school and I’m just wondering we’re trying to find a way to incorporate WoLLoW into our existing provision. Does anyone have any advice or tips?

Steffan Griffiths
This is one way of thinking about it, probably more at secondary level than primary but it does extend into primary. So, this is what we tried to do and although, obviously, we’re lucky at Norwich because I’m involved and can make stuff happen. I think it is important to get someone on the SLT to view your case sympathetically. And please make use of us. If I can help you, I really will. We try to make sure that, in our timetable, we’re thinking not about Latin two lessons a week French or German or Spanish two lessons a week each, English four lessons a week separately, but to think of it as a language faculty of 10 lessons a week. So, we have 40 lessons in the week and a quarter of them are spent on languages.

Once you start thinking like that, there’s a bit more time and a bit more scope for interdisciplinarity. At Norwich we use an English lesson and we take responsibility for the reading log and the library lessons and things like that. But, if you take that thinking down into primary, around how much you’re doing on languages and literacy in in total, then you might be able to have conversations about how the interdisciplinarity of WoLLoW helps PSHE, MFL, literacy, oracy. Then there are some great resources about how WoLLoW helps science. And languages lead very easily into history and you’ve seen all the maps from Rachel. You can get into pretty much any corner of the curriculum through WoLLoW. So, rather than fighting the battle with your timetable, have a conversation about all that WoLLoW can do.

John Claughton
I was just going to say that there are a number of ways in which you can blend it. For example, in the state sector, primary schools are short of specialist language teaching so, when they have a French teacher they teach French, but when they haven’t, they teach WoLLoW. You might also think of different times of the year. In Birmingham, for example, Year six is badly damaged by the very early selective examinations for King Edward School Birmingham and the grammar schools. So, therefore, in Year six after these exams or after SATS, you might use it towards as a preparation for going to secondary school, to try to encourage wider thoughts, so that they are better prepared for whatever they might meet. Soofia and Kensington are a very interesting case. Most state school teachers say, ‘What about OFSTED?’ but Soofia is saying to them, ‘What we’re doing is better than what you’re demanding and so therefore you can just put up with it.’ I think ISI spoke very positively about WoLLoW at Cheadle Hulme and, at a special school where I was a governor, OFSTED praised WoLLoW as the language provision.

John Wilson
In the chat, Ruth has talked about how it works for her. She uses WoLLoW on a curriculum day for Years 1 to 5 and then after SATS for Year 6. Sadly, it’s time to go. We will look to do something similar for secondary schools. Please do please share this this message and we will be sharing the slides and a transcript. So, thank you to Soofia, Rachel and Lauren, to Rebecca and Vincent. We know how precious time is and it’s really much appreciated.

Contact Details

John Claughton: johnclaughton1204@gmail.com

Abbie Dean: adean@norwich-school.org.uk

John Wilson: JohnWilson@CHSchool.org.uk

X: https://x.com/WoLLoWeducation

LinkedIn: World of Languages, Languages of the World

WoLLoW website: https://theworldoflanguages.co.uk/