Date Posted: 6th November
Categories: InternationalSenior School
Languages open doors. Not just to new words, but to new ways of thinking, living, and connecting. They give you the cultural understanding to step into someone else’s world, the humility to communicate across differences, and the confidence to navigate unfamiliar territory.
You could rely on a translation app, of course, but that strips out all the humanity. Speaking even a few words in someone’s language, whether it’s Greek in Athens or Spanish in Madrid, shows that you’ve made the effort, and that effort carries a lot of weight.
We encourage everyone to take at least one language, and we have many success stories of ‘dual linguists’ at A Level. The starting point is always the pupil – head and heart first. What do they care about? What drives them? Once we know that, we can find where a language fits in. And when that connection clicks, the results can be remarkable.
The national statistics aren’t great. Reports say girls are twice as likely as boys to study a Modern Foreign Language at A-level, and too many pupils give up before GCSE because they don’t see the relevance to their careers. For us, that’s exactly the perception we want to change.
It’s not just about speaking fluently. Learning a language builds communication and confidence skills. It’s about being willing to make mistakes in front of people; to admit you don’t know everything, and to keep trying anyway. That sort of resilience stays with you for life.
We try to link languages to our pupils’ own worlds. We’ve brought in speakers from business, sport, and other fields where languages are vital. We organise trips focused on cultural immersion. And we’ve launched a ‘languages café’ where pupils can try out bite-sized conversations in a range of languages, not just those taught formally here.
For the European Day of Languages, which we celebrate each year, we run competitions where pupils create videos, songs and t-shirts…anything to champion languages.
When it comes to the issue of boys learning languages, we started to think outside the box. We were lucky that our cohort of Year 13s contains a fantastic group of lads who happened to all be sporty, motivated, and all with a great sense of humour. We started talking about how to make languages resonate with them and ended up with the idea of creating a video. They were completely on board from the start.
We brought in some help from our Digital Media and Film Studies team to make it happen, and the end result really captures what we wanted to show: that language learning isn’t just about textbooks and exams. It’s about the real world, about connecting to people and culture, about having that spark of curiosity to see things differently.
For me, it’s all about showing that languages are living, breathing skills. They’re not an abstract school subject; they’re a bridge to people, opportunities, and experiences you’d never have otherwise. And once pupils feel that, they stop asking why they should learn a language and start asking what they can learn next.
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