Where lesser mortals would have enjoyed a well earned retirement after a successful career as a teacher, an HMI, and the first Secretary of the Arts Council, Mary had energy to spare. With a colleague, she launched into publishing in 1960 with the successful production of a series of magazines and 45rpm records for school learners of French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian, embodying her conviction that language learning should be fun. Over the next few years, Mary Glasgow Publications emerged as a major player in the field, broadening its range to include films, visual aids, and television courses.

Mary’s love of France led her to buy and restore a hilltop bastide in a village in Provence, and to make it the subject of Entrechaux, her first film for young learners. The village now has its own hugely successful library which was founded in her memory and bears her name. She was honoured for her work by both the French and British governments.

It was in 1978 that Mary Glasgow founded the Mary Glasgow Language Trust with the aim of providing material support to enterprising language teachers. Since Mary’s death in 1983, the small group of Trustees, under the chairmanship of Edwin Glasgow, QC, CBE, has maintained and developed this goal. The Trust relies exclusively on Mary’s bequest for its funding resources, and no longer has any connection at all with Mary Glasgow Publications.

While the Trust was always willing to respond to individual grant applications, it has sought to take a lead by developing high profile schemes of teacher support. The first such scheme was the Teacher Fellowship Programme, which each year funded a teacher’s secondment for a term to undertake a curriculum development project of their choice at the University of York or Bath. In the early 1990s, the Trust switched to a new focus, with the School Awards Scheme, an annual prize for innovation in the teaching of languages. Since 2000 the Trust has been working closely as a partner with CILT in the development of the European Awards for Languages, which closely follow the lines of the MGLT scheme, and the Mary Glasgow Language Trust now selects the winner of the £2000 Mary Glasgow Award from the recipients of the European Awards.

Since 2006, the Trust has set up the Mary Glasgow 14-19 Prize for Curriculum Innovation . The Prize is worth £5000 and up to 4 Prizes can be awarded in any one year. Our aim in setting up this scheme is to support and reward those who are using fresh and relevant ways of including languages in the 14-19 curriculum, and to bring a range of successful approaches to much wider attention.

Over the last 30 years, the Mary Glasgow Language Trust has become well known for its support of teachers of foreign languages in the UK and the important work that they do.