Diversity/Mother Tongue

(Managed by Medway Council)

Every Child Matters outcomes met:

• enjoying and achieving

Our Mother Tongue project has been reconfigured to meet changing needs.

Recently, Medway has had an influx of families from Eastern Europe. Most of the parents do not speak English and the children are beginners in English. Research shows that the first language has an important role in developing cognitive-academic success in the second, but there is a lack of bilingual school personnel to support the use and development of the first language for learning. This project, run by the Minority Ethnic Achievement team (schools advisory service) provides multilingual learning materials to raise achievement. Although these are for use in school, they can also be taken home for parents to support their children’s learning. A welcome DVD has been produced in 5 languages – Slovak, Polish, Czech and Russian, and English for the teachers, to introduce the English education system to parents of new arrivals. Schools are also given leaflets giving advice on what parents new to English can do to support their child. The team also piloted a project with two Medway schools and Rochester’s Guildhall Museum where year 5 children were encouraged to bring in objects that tell a story of their family’s heritage and history, thereby involving families and providing others with an insight into their culture. The new arrival children have all made progress in English language development and are now able to access the curriculum at some level or other. The resources will be disseminated to raise awareness and as examples of good practice. Bilingual staff are also being sought to develop similar resources in other languages.

Impact Evaluation(75KB)

Prior to the reconfiguration, Mother tongue language tuition was provided by Medway Ethnic Minority Forum for children from various ethnic groups in many community settings in Medway.  It employed a number of bi-lingual mother tongue teachers to work from a number of locations within Medway with children between age of 5 and 14 who did not fluently speak, understand or read/write their mother tongue language.

Independent Evaluation(735KB)