Now in its third year, the “A Place in Europe” Challenge aims to encourage Year 9 students to use their language skills in a work-related environment as they acquire new and highly-transferable skills such as pitching a presentation, learning basic marketing and business skills and becoming more financially literate through a greater understanding of the costs of living and moving home.
Over the course of the spring term, the students, who had been divided into teams, decide on roles for themselves and assume different responsibilities within their “relocation” company. Their brief is simple: form a company that can move a fictitious family (“the Tylers”) from the UK to a French, German or Spanish-speaking country in Europe, find them an area to live, a new home, jobs for the parents and schools for the children.
As well as learning the necessary vocabulary and grammatical structures (which is deliberately designed to prepare them for the GCSE course), they also have to learn business skills in order to market their company to make it unique and therefore more attractive . The teams competing in the Grand Final in the summer term are the teams who won the internal competitions within their respective school by showing the most enterprise, having the best communication skills, working collaboratively as a team and demonstrating the most innovative ideas.
This year teams of students from Haybridge, Stourport and King Charles I schools will again battle it out in front of a panel of local business judges, who use languages as part of their job. Chair of the judging panel, Sue Clark from Midland Technical Translations (UK) Ltd based in Kidderminster, commented, “This competition is going from strength to strength, showcasing what students can achieve in terms of language development, research and presentation skills in a foreign language. The standard is high, their commitment is obvious and it’s a real pleasure to listen to their performances. I look forward to the final on 19th June in Stourport.”
Contact For more info:
Mr K. Kilmartin
Head of Modern Foreign Languages
Haybridge High School & Sixth Form
kkilmartin@haybridge.worcs.sch.uk
or Sue Clark
Managing Director
Midland Technical Translations (UK) Ltd
sue@midlandtechnical.co.uk
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