I am writing this in July, but I wish I had written it in June, and I won't be able to publish it until September. Because that's when the official "Comms" launch of the National Priorities Projects takes off. But I need to document what we are doing as we go along, because I can already see it's going to be an important journey that we are on as a department, and hopefully we can take you along with us for the ride!
The brief was a project that explored Interculturality and its relevance to language learning, which could take place between June 2026 and January 2027, ready to be written up and disseminated from February of 2027.
We decided to propose a project around our Year 7 French Art Exhibition. Every pupil in Year 7 creates an artwork and writes the description card in French. Their work goes on display to the paying public in a local Windmill exhibition space. It's a project we have run for at least 12 years at the Windmill, and before that with the exhibition happening in school.
The aims of the project are threefold:
1. The simple mechanics of the project can be shared with other schools who find it an attractive idea and see the benefits for pupils as language learners. The French Exhibition is something we know is feasible, deliverable and replicable.
2. To explore whether the project is indeed beneficial, particularly in terms of whether it has impact on the explicit learning of the language. The Art Exhibition itself isn't new for us. What we want to do is to interrogate it and examine our preconceptions. It may well turn out to contribute to language learning, but can we put our finger on in exactly what ways it drives progression?
3. To extrapolate from what we learn from examining the impact of the Art Exhibition and apply those lessons to the rest of our curriculum. And to share those insights and experiences with other schools.
I have written here about the French Exhibition and what it is supposed to deliver. It is intended to show pupils that they can be creative in the language from the very start. And that learning a language is about communicating, not just the mechanics of building sentences.
On the other hand, in this post, I wrote about the idea that demanding creativity and communication from learners so early could be a mistake. Does it lure them into trying to say things they can't, creating work full of errors? Does the artwork distract from the nitty gritty of language learning? Should pupils instead be concentrating on rehearsing accurate sentences exemplifying carefully sequenced grammar? Does describing an artwork lead to learning "one off" words and structures which will never be seen again and just be forgotten?
I thought I had an answer to these questions: that grammar and communication are not incompatible. Because if every learner creates their own picture, we have to equip them with the grammatical knowledge to write their own individual description. But what if I am using this argument to persuade myself that the French Exhibition is a "good thing"? What can we do to be sure?
These same questions apply not just to the French Exhibition, but to all our work as a Laboratory School in identifying what works and what doesn't work in teaching and learning. It links to our work this year on the ideas of our keynote speaker David Didau, who we were lucky enough to host for an INSET day in January 2026. Not in order to implement his ideas. But in order to discuss, reflect and examine our curriculum. For languages, the main take-away from his session was the idea that pupils should be practising the mechanics of constructing error free sentences. I reflected on the implications of this here. Our French Exhibition would seem to fly in the face of his advice.
It also links to our work on cognitive load, in particular to our construction of a Department Inclusion Plan. If we want to engineer classroom tasks such that the cognitive load of the task is pitched perfectly for individual learners, so that there is the right level of challenge and support, then we need to identify the "core instructional content". What exactly is it that we want pupils to learn, and what is extraneous? Things we may want to do in order to make the work attractive, may actually be a distraction from the learning. We have been told by Ofsted in their "research review" and accompanying webinars that language learning should focus on the nitty gritty of the language itself, "boiled down" to the basics and that pupils should not move on until they are secure. Does this mean that our learners who require most support should have a restricted diet of carefully sequenced grammar and high frequency vocabulary with no extra demands or distractions? Many of us would find that idea unpalateable.
And if we are going to be examining what it is that really matters when pupils are learning a language, the sequencing and demands of the course, the engineering of tasks... then we can use this to review our whole curriculum and its resources, and in the process explore the parameters of our shared vision and differing values as members of the same languages department.
That's the unofficial rationale of the project. The real rationale of the project, rooted in our reality. I am sure on the form I filled in I tried to tick a few more boxes on the list of criteria, which I can examine in future posts. For starters, I need at some point to write about how Interculturality plays out in this project. And I am holding back on all the things we have discussed and discovered as a department already in the first month of the project. I can see that it's going to be a real eye-opener of a journey, so I'm glad I've got the starting point documented, even if you can't read it until September. There's more to come. Lots more!
Next Post: Definining Interculturality.
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