The Mary Glasgow Award 2008 was won by Wildern School, Hedge End, near Southampton, for their ‘Group Talk’  project.

At the European Awards ceremony in July 2008, ‘Group Talk’ won not only a European Award and the Mary Glasgow £2000 Award, it also carried off the French Embassy Prize, and the TDA Initial Teacher Education Prize of £1000.

This highly successful approach to teaching and learning gives pupils the linguistic ‘tools’ to use the language they are learning for a real purpose – to speak it confidently and in the most natural way possible, to express preferences and points of view, to ask others for their opinion, to discuss with one another, to agree and disagree, and to acquire an ability to control the direction that a conversation takes.

The Mary Glasgow Trustees, who visited the school to observe the project in action, found it a real pleasure to see pupils so well able to converse spontaneously and happily in a foreign language and to see the exemplary planning and the commitment of the teachers. Adjudicators for the European Award who visited separately said “We thought we were hallucinating when we witnessed groups of teenage boys chatting animatedly in French about sport cars and school uniform. The conversations were organic and the pupils were clearly not speaking from a script.”

Where the Wildern School project is innovative is that ‘Group Talk’ forms the core of a highly successful and motivating overall approach to learning languages, not just to learning to speak them. Evidence of its success is that it has triggered a  marked rise in the numbers of pupils opting for languages after the age of 14, and recent GCSE results prove that this approach has contributed to rising standards, particularly those of the boys – with nearly 4 times as many boys as girls achieving an A*. Wildern School is committed, through its Leading Edge status, to sharing its practice with other schools – so for others wishing to set up something similar, there would be a ready made model to copy.    

Wildern School languages teachers, Hazel Mair, Liz Hall and Greg  Horton, receive their £2000 cheque from Ann King, Hon. Secretary of the Mary Glasgow Trust, at the European Awards ceremony 2008