Learning a foreign language is a liberation from insularity and provides an opening to other cultures. A high-quality languages education should foster pupils’ curiosity and deepen their understanding of the world. (National Curriculum)

At The Spinney Primary School, we value the many languages spoken in our school community. We have a strong focus on effective communication throughout our curriculum, which extends to our Languages curriculum.

Pupils are taught French weekly from Year 3 until Year 6. Our approach to teaching French is underpinned by an understanding that learning one language opens the doors to learning others. We use the CUSP French Curriculum.

CUSP French has been purposefully built around the principles of evidence-led practice. This is to ensure that there is a focus on high-quality development of children as linguists. Core areas of study are revisited throughout the curriculum. Each unit of study focuses on phonics, grammatical structures, reading, writing, oracy and vocabulary. Fully resourced, CUSP French is both teacher facing and pupil facing, building consistency in how French is taught across the school and ensuring that teachers, including those with no prior knowledge of French, have the subject knowledge required to teach the content. CUSP French has been designed to serve young linguists in the modern world. Key areas of focus have been deliberately selected to ensure that pupils are equipped with knowledge and language that will serve them in engaging with important and useful topics such as the environment, wellbeing and travel. The curriculum focuses not just on vocabulary acquisition but also on the building blocks of learning a new language. Clear structures and learning routines underpin CUSP French. This allows pupils (and teachers) to direct their cognitive attention to the core content in each block. As with all CUSP subjects, Knowledge Notes are used to support instruction and the revisiting of new concepts. This strong focus on cognitive science provides the framework for pupils to deepen and broaden their knowledge of the French language and become confident, inspired linguists.

Pupils in KS1 are exposed to a variety of other Modern Foreign Languages through a weekly session focusing on the "Language of the Term".

We seek to empower our children for their future where living, working or travelling abroad may require the confidence and skill to communicate in another language.

Our goals are that pupils will learn to:

• understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources.
• speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and continually improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation.
• 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.