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Regional Language Centres webcast
Thursday, 9 July, 2009.
Transcript
Regional Language Centres Interview with Mike Kelly — Director of the Links into Languages programme
Interviewer Hetty Meyric Hughes: Welcome to the Teachernet interview on Regional Language Centres. With me today I've got Professor Mike Kelly, Director of the Links into Languages programme. Hello Mike, thanks for joining us.
Mike Kelly: Hi Hetty, thank you very much.
Hetty Meyric Hughes: To start with I'd like you to tell me about the background to the Links Programme and also your vision for its future.
Mike Kelly: Right, the Links programme was really the brain child of the DCSF who were faced with the problem that there's a lot of provision of Professional Development for teachers and teaching assistants and people in languages and that teachers were finding they just didn't know where to turn for the information — too much information. So one of the main aims of Links into Languages is to link up the provision of Professional Development so that teachers and teaching assistants and headteachers will know where to go to find information and will know where they will find a good coherent programme of CPD.
The second wing of it really is providing a programme of Professional Development, part of which is designed to meet national priority issues, so my vision is to create a learning community in which trainers, teachers, headteachers, policy makers, everybody concerned with languages comes together, links up and improves each other's understanding of what it's all about.
Hetty Meyric Hughes: So it's peer to peer as well, rather than a message outwards towards them?
Mike Kelly: Yes, and in fact one of the key parts of the programme is our Linked Up scheme which is very much about encouraging teachers to group together to work on problems and try to find solutions which they can then share with other teachers.
Hetty Meyric Hughes: Your own background is in French and in higher education. How do you feel that set of expertise or experience will lend themselves particularly to this role?
Mike Kelly: My experience in higher education has increasingly taught me that higher education needs to learn from secondary and indeed primary education and that we've got things in common and there are things we can share. Now one of my most recent initiatives under government encouragement is a programme called Roots into Languages which is designed to increase the cooperation between universities and colleges on the one hand and schools on the other to try and increase the take-up of languages and motivate the students to make the case.
The other wing of that is teacher education, now I did a project about five years ago for the European Commission, looking at what kind of provision there should be right across Europe for the education of Language teachers and that showed me that there was a huge demand, very often unmet, for Continuing Professional Development to change the way that languages are taught and to improve the effectiveness to exchange ideas and good practices. Now that's right across Europe. What Links into Languages is trying to do is to implement that vision across England.
Hetty Meyric Hughes: OK, can you possibly tell me about the funding behind the Links Programme and about your different partners in the consortium.
Mike Kelly: The funding is provided by the Department for Children, Schools and Families who I think see this as an important part of the national languages strategy which the Department has pioneered over the last six or seven years. They've provided funding essentially to establish a regional centre in each of the nine English government regions to provide the infrastructure for CPD, for support to teachers for information. We've come together in a partnership between three organisations with different experiences. Now they have a lot of experience in networking, in responding to teachers' needs, in disseminating information and encouraging research about languages and language teaching. So we feel that that's a very good mix, ALL really addressing teachers, SSAT addressing schools and the Subject Centre bringing in the higher education expertise.
Hetty Meyric Hughes: So, obviously there's an existing languages community but how will your work help to foster that and develop it and glue it together somehow?
Mike Kelly: The networks and the structures for primary-school teachers are not as well established as they are in the secondary sector and they are emerging but I think it's a golden opportunity to draw together the primary and the secondary sectors so they are working together. That's going to be very important for ensuring the transition between primary and secondary education for the pupils and in the end it's about the pupils.
Hetty Meyric Hughes: Your site talks about a lot of resources and drop in facilities and training, can you tell me about that?
Mike Kelly: In each of the nine regions there will be a university which hosts the regional centre. They will have, obviously, staff, drop in facilities and in most cases some resources, text book learning materials and so on and certainly access to training facilities and rooms and spaces.
Hetty Meyric Hughes: OK, so what form of accreditation might there be for the Professional Development programme?
Mike Kelly: We're working very closely with the TDA to match our provision to the accreditation framework. The other avenue we are exploring is accreditation through universities' programmes of one kind or another. There will be an academic dimension to accreditation so that it then becomes available as a master's level qualification rather than a purely vocational one.
Hetty Meyric Hughes: OK, so how will Links be working with existing providers then?
Mike Kelly: That will be a very important part of our work because Links is intended to link up existing provision as well as provide new courses. We've certainly had some very detailed discussions with CILT, the national centre for languages who have a well established reputation in provision and we are certainly expecting to work closely with them in providing Professional Development. The British Council, the number of organisations and agencies, the British Council is obviously very active in a number of areas, but probably the local authorities will be the largest single grouping with whom we'll work.
Hetty Meyric Hughes: There's also the award scheme, the Linked Up award scheme, which it would be great to hear about.
Mike Kelly: Yes, well in some ways that's the heart of the matter, because the Linked Up award scheme precisely is aimed at providing teachers with a little bit of resource to enable them to address issues and problems which they have identified. Now we are expecting to award something like 50 projects in the first year, these will be fairly modest projects but with resource to enable teachers to meet, to get together, to carry out some activities so that what we hope increasingly to generate are groups and networks of teachers who are first of all solving problems and secondly letting other people know what solutions they have found and I think that is integral to the learning community that teachers are not only teachers they are also learners, they teach each other and they learn from each other.
Hetty Meyric Hughes: So just to recap, I know that you mentioned the website address earlier, but if you could just repeat that so that we know how teachers can access all this great information and get going.
Mike Kelly: Yes, the website is www.linksintolanguages.ac.uk and teachers will be able to find a host of information there.
Hetty Meyric Hughes: It's already there?
Mike Kelly: There's quite a lot already there, there is more coming but do click on.
Hetty Meyric Hughes: Great, well thank you very much for joining us, Professor Mike Kelly
Mike Kelly: Thank you very much for having me.
