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Monday, 7 September 2026

NPP 5: An in depth interview reacting to the idea that our French Exhibition could have aspects which Distract from Language Learning.

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 As a department we love our French Exhibition where each pupil in Year 7 creates an artwork and describes it in French. But central to our ...

NPP 4: A Languages Department reacts to the idea that you can have too much creativity and too much communication.

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 Our Year 7 French Exhibition is centred around the idea that communication and creativity should spark motivation, drive language learning,...

NPP 3: The Continuum from Mechanical Exercises to Communicative Tasks

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 One of my kids who is a bit of a mathematician is very cross with Gauss. She maintains that he is only famous because he lived back when no...

NPP 2: Defining Interculturality

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 This is the second of a series of blogs documenting our National Priorities Project journey in thinking about Interculturality and how it ...

UCLE/UCL NPP 1: The Brief. Interculturality and its direct links to language learning

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 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 w...
Thursday, 27 August 2026

Why everything you have been told about La Casa de Bernarda Alba is Wrong

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 La Casa de Bernarda Alba. Everything you have been told about it is wrong. 1. The Stage Set A white-walled bare stage set with stark lighti...
Friday, 21 August 2026

GCSE Results 2026

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 There seems to be some improvement in some of the grades allocated to Languages at GCSE this year.  We know that in terms of the key points...
Sunday, 9 August 2026

Challenging the System Part 6: Next Steps...

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 In a previous post, I offered a vision of what a functioning languages ecosystem in the English state sector could look like. With a posit...
Friday, 19 June 2026

Challenging the System. Part 5. The Vocabulary (and Grammar) Curriculum: A Failed Experiment

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 Actually, that title is unfair. In science an experiment is never a failure. If you discover something doesn't work, then you have lear...
Thursday, 11 June 2026

Challenging the System Part 4: Are we ripe for AI to take over in language teaching?

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 Here's a scary thought. Is MFL teaching in exactly the sort of place where AI could take over and do the job instead of us? Firstly the...
Sunday, 31 May 2026

AI will kill your children and abandon their Granny. Don't use it.

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 The worst thing AI has done for me is this: I was testing its problem solving skills by asking it how to cut a cheesecake into 5 equal piec...
Friday, 29 May 2026

Challenging the System Part 3: Transition from KS2 to KS3

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 Sorting out unfair grading at GCSE, with its immediate impact on pupil motivation to take a language, incentivisation for schools, and on t...