5:50pm Friday 27th January 2012
Schools minister Nick Gibb is visiting Cumbria for the first time to find out how a unique collaboration between a specialist language school and a university will revolutionise how modern language teachers are trained.
As from September Dallam School will be the new centre for the University of Cumbria’s renowned modern foreign languages teacher training courses. Instead of being taught at the university’s Lancaster campus language students will now be based in Milnthorpe. This will result in further improvements in the teaching of languages at Dallam and provide newly trained languages teachers with a better understanding of working in a school.
The partnership brings together the university, rated as one of the best in the UK to study a PGCE Modern Foreign Language and Dallam, an International Baccalaureate World School. Dallam School is also a member of the Teaching Development Agency’s bilingual teaching initiative and is one of only four schools in the country represented on a newly established Ministerial Languages Steering Group.
The minister, who is visiting on February 6, will also hear how bilingual tutor time at Dallam, with all class discussions taking place in French, has dramatically increased the grades of Year 9 students and also allowing them to sit their GCSE exams two years early. Mr Gibb will see some of the new facilities at the school including residential accommodation for Dallam’s boarding students who come from all over the world to study at the school.
Headteacher Steve Holdup said: “There is a lot of innovation in education at the moment and it’s happening here in the South Lakes where schools do so well in their Ofsted inspections. The South Lakes Federation collaboration as a Teaching School is a good example of this. The minister is keen to learn about what we are doing and we are very pleased that our work is being recognised by such a high level visit, a first for the minister in Cumbria.”
Mr Gibb will be accompanied by local MP, Tim Farron and meet school staff, governors, members of the South Lakes Federation and local primary schools.
Dallam is a mixed comprehensive (11-19 yr olds) school with boarding in Milnthorpe. It has 1014 students of which 125 board.
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