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INSET in Paris

Judith Elshaw, headteacher of Woolston Community Primary School in Warrington, describes a novel way of embedding languages into the primary curriculum and motivating staff by an exciting form of teacher INSET.

I am headteacher of a two form entry primary school in Warrington and I passionately believe that children should begin to learn an additional language as early as possible. My own first experience of beginning to learn Latin and French at grammar school with a large group of people that I had never worked with before was not a positive one and not one that I want to repeat with the children in my care. We first introduced French into KS2 by employing a specialist teacher for 2 days per week and she gave each class teacher some PPA time during the two 30 minute lessons.

I had concerns about the segregation of this subject however, especially as we were trying to deliver other subjects with a cross curricular approach. I also knew that in the long term employing a specialist teacher would not be financially viable, especially as I intended to extend the language into KS1. 

With the support of our Primary Strategy Consultant we began to try to build the confidence of all staff through staff meetings. Our local authority consultant is an extremely energetic, enthusiastic INSET leader but some of my staff were less than convinced and continued to rely solely on the specialist teacher.

I needed to inspire and motivate staff and give them a really positive reason to engage with learning the language. I therefore chose to devote a whole INSET day to French, but instead of visiting speakers, role play and workshops, I decided to take all the staff to France. Paris was our chosen destination for several reasons – we are only twenty minutes from Liverpool airport, it is possible to go to Paris for the day. Paris offers art galleries, restaurants and places of cultural interest.

As this INSET would involve getting up extremely early to check in at 6.30am and arriving back in Liverpool quite late, at about 11.15pm, each member of staff was asked individually if they were prepared to give up this amount of their own time. Everyone was on board and agreed to this and suddenly the interest and involvement in French at staff meetings was there!

During the day in Paris the staff were expected to:

• Use the metro map to find their way from Charles de Gaulle airport to the first place they were visiting
• Order drinks from a café
• Order a meal in a restaurant
• Find their way to the second place of interest
• Read signs and information in French
• Buy resources for their classroom
• Collect resources for the school French Day
• Use and listen to the language as much as possible.

Following the INSET day all staff, teachers, teaching assistants and office staff completed an evaluation of the day. Here are some of their comments:

“Being in France compelled me to use my French and as the day progressed inhibitions were lost.”

“I have never been to France before and feel more inspired to speak French and teach French after my first hand experience.”

“I loved travelling on the metro. They announced the name of each station before the train stopped and we could look at the sign and practise the pronunciation.”

We had a French theme day in school following the INSET day and the children thoroughly enjoyed hearing first hand accounts of Paris. They also sampled French food, learnt new vocabulary and looked at photographs and artefacts.

We are planning to continue to develop the language skills of all our staff but the visit to Paris was a turning point in staff motivation and confidence. All teachers now use some French incidentally throughout the week for classroom interaction, and with games such as Jacques a dit. The language is used for registration and other embedding activities, such as praise and instructions.

Now we look to the future and ask – where next?