Intent

At North Scarle Primary, we are committed to providing a Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) education that encourages curiosity and a lifelong love for languages and cultures. Our primary language curriculum is designed to introduce children to the world beyond their immediate surroundings, enabling them to explore and appreciate the diversity of the global community.

Our four key threads are our vision and weave through everything we do at North Scarle Primary School:

Inclusivity: Our language curriculum has been written to support our pupils to develop into globally responsible and inclusive citizens.

Enriched: Our enriched language curriculum provides children with opportunities to understand and discuss how languages differ and make links between languages.

Aspirational: Our high expectations aim to stretch and challenge children’s knowledge and skills to enable them to be confident multilinguists.  

Inspirational: Our inspiring language curriculum uses a wide range of teaching methods, including dancing, singing and games to engage and support learning.  

Implementation

At North Scarle Primary School, we pride ourselves on teaching a multilingual, mixed-age rolling programme, consisting of French and Spanish. This allows children to learn two new languages, encouraging confidence to become bilingual and broadening their cultural awareness and understanding. Additionally, this means older children will have acquired transferable skills, strategies and knowledge of grammatical features from previous languages learnt.

Our language curriculum begins in class 2 (year 3 and 4) where French and Spanish are taught on a one-year rolling cycle at an introductory level. This ensures that every child in class 2 will be taught a year of each language. Next, children will move to class 3 (year 5 and 6) where they will again be taught one year of both French and then Spanish at a progressed level ensuring that progression and retrieval have been achieved through our KS2 classes.

Our MFL curriculum is built around essential skills developed from the National Curriculum. These essential skills include: speaking confidently, using key vocabulary and phrases to communicate ideas; listening attentively, showing understanding by joining in and responding; reading carefully, understanding key vocabulary and phrases; using key vocabulary and applying basic grammar to build sentences and understanding the culture of the language being spoken.

MFL is taught every week as a stand-alone, 30-minute lesson in addition to being embedded into the wider classroom when the opportunity arises.

Key knowledge and vocabulary are revisited regularly, and links are made within and between languages, which supports children in remembering their learning through spaced repetition. Teachers provide opportunities to retrieve previously taught content within lessons and through a weekly POP quiz.

Impact

By the time our Year 6 children leave for secondary school, we want them to be able to speak and write confidently in a range of languages, meeting the requirements of the National Curriculum.

They will be equipped, not only with the skills and knowledge of other languages, but also a good understanding of diversity, inclusion and the joy of learning other languages and about other cultures.