Primary Coordinator - Mr T F Thynne

The MFL Department has been involved with outreach work in local primary schools since 1997 and has now established an extensive programme of work in a total of twelve schools. The original pattern of provision was a six-week module of French teaching to pupils in year six and this was combined with a programme of Saturday-morning classes for children from  the Torbay and Teignbridge areas. This pattern of provision grew to include some Spanish teaching and to involve work with years 4 and 5. The work at White Rock School in Paignton was more extensive and involved our Head of Spanish being timetabled for one day per week to train teachers as well as to teach Spanish to pupils.

The current provision sees us working with ten schools in Torbay and two in Teignbridge.  Our teaching programme in each school is drawn up after careful consultation with the primary schools and, in some cases, continues throughout the academic year. The majority of schools still request French teaching but Spanish is also taught.  A list is appended below of schools currently in our "family".

The teaching is done by tutors outside the MFL department at TBGS. Some of these are native speakers; others are qualified and experienced language teachers. All are employed on an hourly-paid basis.

We also provide INSET opportunities for local Primary teachers. Each year we organize a ten-week INSET course either in French or Spanish which aims both to raise the participants' confidence in the language and to train them in methodology appropriate to the Primary MFL classroom. These courses are run for us by two ASTs from KEVICS, Totnes, Sarah Ferguson and Fiona Davis and have been extremely popular and effective in raising the profile of MFL in local schools.

We also aim to provide material support for MFL in our schools by purchasing appropriate materials for their own staff to use.  A key idea of our programme is to increase the capacity within the primary schools to build upon the outside help that we have given. For this reason, our tutors work in the classroom together with the class teachers or classroom assistants. This is seen as crucial and avoids the phenomenon known as "Spanish and vanish".

The responsibility for the Primary Languages programme at TBGS lies with Trefor Thynne who attends National Conferences hosted by CILT and other agencies. Mr Thynne maintains close links with all the schools in our "family" and aims to respond to their developing needs within the scope of our budget.

Every year in October a meeting is held at TBGS for representatives from all our schools. This meeting facilitates the exchange of ideas in a sphere which is becoming more and more important with the Government's requirement that all Primary schools offer MFL teaching from 2010.

In this latter connection, there has been the launch of a scheme within the Torbay Education authority to bring language teaching into all of its primary schools. TBGS has collaborated closely in the planning and development of this scheme and has in particular been able to help with the recruitment of tutors. This scheme will see much further development in the next few years.

In summary, the work done by TBGS in local Primary Schools as a major plank of its outreach work has grown considerably over the last decade and is still expanding. The desirability of effective language teaching at an earlier age is now generally recognized and TBGS's role as a Specialist school has enabled a great deal to be done in a field which previously was almost bare.