Plat Douet Primary School, Jersey, awarded gold

Congratulations to Plat Douet Primary School In Jersey on the award of the Gold EAL Quality Mark! Since I last visited the school in 2023, it has strengthened and embedded its provision for what it now chooses to call its multilingual learners. Out of school hours it hosts Romanian classes and is moving to provide Portuguese classes. Even the sign in the staff toilet about putting hand towels in the right bin is in Portuguese.  

At the heart of the school’s success is a consistent approach to teaching and learning, with oracy at the heart of it.  Staff act as language role models, encouraging pupils to talk in pairs to produce increasingly complex phrases as they work their way through vocabulary tiers. Many teachers and teaching assistants are also fluent in languages other than English.

What I learnt most from, however, was an extended discussion with a small group of pupils about their languages and how they use them.  They recalled a special Christmas event in which pupils taught each other how to sing Jingle Bells in English, French, Portuguese, Jerriais and Romanian. It is a good thing to hear the register called in your own language. It is quite another, as one pupil recalled, seeing the eyes of a Shona pupil lighting up with joy as they heard their own language in class.

What followed was a fascinating and sophisticated discussion in English of translanguaging. Why do you sometimes change language in the middle of a sentence? Do your parents talk to you in more than one language? Which one talks to you in which languages?  What language do you dream in?

The confidence of these pupils to talk about such a complex subject reflects the consistency of the teaching in their classrooms. It is possible because all staff are committed to encouraging multilingualism as both a good thing in itself and an effective way of promoting high attainment in assessments in English.