CALDAY GRANGE GRAMMAR SCHOOL Building for the future – upon the strengths of the past STARTING CHINESE IN YOUR SCHOOL ‘A Headteacher’s Perspective’

As a Headteacher, I believe passionately that today’s students will only become tomorrow’s generation of creative academics and entrepreneurs if they are given time and space to learn about the world outside the school gate. It is clear to me that our most urgent priority in achieving this goal is for all students to understand more about China and Chinese culture, and for a healthy number of these students to learn Mandarin Chinese to GCSE level or beyond. China is a country with a great history, and a future that has enormous potential. We will fail our students if we do not open their eyes to this and enable many of them to leave school with some knowledge of China. CALDAY GRANGE GRAMMAR SCHOOL Building for the future – upon the strengths of the past

HOW WE BECAME INVOLVED IN THE TEACHING OF MANDARIN  Mandarin was first introduced into Calday over 10 years ago as an extension activity at our on-site Wirral Able Child centre for gifted and talented children  We did try other languages first such as Japanese but the one that captured the imagination of our pupils was Mandarin  We decided to include Mandarin as part of our main curriculum alongside five other languages  We now have over 200 pupils learning Mandarin  We quickly established a link with Hangzhou Foreign Language School in South East China which has been invaluable CALDAY GRANGE GRAMMAR SCHOOL Building for the future – upon the strengths of the past

CALDAY GRANGE GRAMMAR SCHOOL Building for the future – upon the strengths of the past

TEACHERS OF CHINESE  We currently have two teachers of Chinese and three teaching assistants who are great fun, with a wicked sense of humour and penchant for Karaoke!  A native speaker on the staff is invaluable  It is important to try and establish links with a school in China as this helps to enhance the teaching of Mandarin by use of a teacher exchange programme  It is not always easy at first for teachers of Chinese to fit in with the western ways of teaching so they may need guidance CALDAY GRANGE GRAMMAR SCHOOL Building for the future – upon the strengths of the past

OUR INVOLVEMENT AS A CONFUCIUS CLASSROOM  Ten Headteachers with different experiences of Mandarin were forming a Steering group to promote Mandarin which co-incided with the SSAT persuading Hanban, the Chinese equivalent of the British Council, to give them ‘Confucius Institute’ status  There are now five ‘Confucius Classrooms’ around the Country  Our aim is to make Mandarin as mainstream as French and Spanish CALDAY GRANGE GRAMMAR SCHOOL Building for the future – upon the strengths of the past

HOW WE HAVE HELPED TO BRING MANDARIN INTO OTHER SCHOOLS INCLUDING PRIMARIES  Learning Mandarin needs a different approach to learning a European Language - students find it challenging but rewarding.  We firmly believe that children learn languages best when they start young so we have supported a number of primary schools in introducing Mandarin.  We found that there were few teaching resources for primary schools so we have recently published our first book called “MaoMao and the Bamboo”  We have also adopted a number of ‘spoke’ schools to spread Mandarin across the North West CALDAY GRANGE GRAMMAR SCHOOL Building for the future – upon the strengths of the past

For any assistance relating to the teaching of Chinese please contact us as follows:- Calday Grange Grammar School Grammar School Lane West Kirby Wirral CH48 8GG Tel: Fax: Website: MaoMao website: CALDAY GRANGE GRAMMAR SCHOOL Building for the future – upon the strengths of the past