At Hereward Primary School, the core language taught is French; this is first introduced to pupils in the Early Years’ Foundation Stage, before being explored further in KS1 and in more comprehensive detail in KS2. We stimulate pupils’ interest in learning a new language by making lessons engaging and enjoyable, encouraging their curiosities about a new culture and language. Wherever possible, children explore additional languages, including Spanish in later KS2. Children are encouraged to make comparisons between the languages taught at school and other languages, including those used at home. We wish to instill a lifelong love of learning languages within our pupils, inspiring them to pursue language study outside of school and in their futures.

The national curriculum for languages aims to ensure that all pupils:

• understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of sources;
• speak with increasing confidence and fluency, including through discussion and asking questions;
• can write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt;
• discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied.

Languages is a statutory subject for all pupils in Key Stage 2 (Years 3-6), but at Hereward our language teaching begins in Key Stage 1 and Reception. Our chosen foreign language is French and we use a wide variety of resources to support this. Additionally, in Year 6, the pupils complete a unit of work on Spanish.