The current drive to encourage diversity in school types appears to be having an unexpected impact on the number of bilingual schools in England. The Bilingual Primary School, a Spanish/English medium free school in Brighton, is just part of a growing trend according to a recent TES article (04.01.13).
The TES article gives examples such as
- the free Europa School UK in Oxfordshire, which is replacing the European School,
- an English-German bilingual school due to open in South London next year
- Tiger Primary School in Maidstone, Kent, a free school which is not bilingual but where children learn Mandarin.
As the article notes, in 2006 Wix Primary School in southwest London was the first state primary to have a bilingual stream. This school works in partnership with the Lycee Francais Charles de Gaulle and the French Embassy to provide a bilingual stream alongside the English-only and French-only streams.
Wix headteacher Marc Wolstencroft is quoted as saying “It’s easier, in terms of creating a vision for a school, to create a school from scratch and say, ‘This is going to be a bilingual school’, than to do it within the current state system,”.
Schools planning to develop a bilingual approach to learning could do worse than consult a newly released book by the renowned dual-language-education researchers Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier, Dual Language Education for a Transformed World. this provides ample evidence that not only is dual language best practice for second-language acquisition, but it is also the "most powerful school reform model for high academic achievement, whatever the demographic mix!"
There are different models of dual-language education, including 50/50 two-way (in which half of instruction is presented in English and the other half in the target language), and 90/10 full immersion (in which nearly all instruction is conducted in the foreign language being taught). Communities with native Spanish-speaking, Mandarin-speaking, or other English-language-learner populations can benefit from the 50/50 model—a program that promotes academic achievement through enrichment, rather than remediation. In 90/10 programs, native English-speaking students benefit from the academic rigor inherent in learning nearly all content through the target language.
