Welcome to Gathered Together

Celebrating language diversity at the Scottish Learning Festival

i Sep 24th No Comments by

SLF15

A huge thanks to everyone who came along to our seminar at the Scottish Learning Festival yesterday. It was great to have the opportunity to share the learning from the Scotland, People and Language Forum we held in February with new people and highlight some of the issues that were raised in the Forum. One of the points that people had raised was the importance of having resources and that these resources were being used- if bilingual books aren’t being borrowed a library won’t reorder them. In our briefing papers we have identified some great resources around language learning- including information about supporting bilingual learners, an introduction to the 1+2 Approach and sites that selling dual language books.

In preparing for this seminar we asked people to share their good practice in celebrating language diversity and got some fabulous ideas back including the work of James Gilespies primary school in Edinburgh where  “The Gruffalo” was read in 14 languages! We would really like to hear more about what you are doing to celebrate the languages in your schools and communities- please share your ideas

Your can read the full report from the Scotland People and Language Forum here or click here to see our presentation

You can read the briefing papers we created for the seminar

Scotland People and Language 1+2

Scotland People and Language Language diversity

Scottish Learning Festival- open to parents!

i Sep 4th No Comments by

Scottish_learning_festival_tcm4-825510

The Scottish Learning Festival is an annual event, held in Glasgow’s vast SECC over two days in late September. It brings together teachers, local authorities, organisations working with children and for the first time this year parents. It is an opportunity to hear from experts in the field of education, attend seminars and network with professionals. We are delighted that parents are able to attend this year, the theme is “raising achievement and attainment for all” and parents are key partners in improving children’s outcomes in education. Our partners at the Scottish parent Teacher Council and the National Parent Forum Scotland are hosting a “parents connect” zone full of sessions for parents and to share the importance of parental involvement.

Gathered Together will be delivering a seminar (25th at 12pm) looking at the impact of parents being involved in their children’s education and the benefits of getting parents from different cultures to the school and the children. Our seminar will also be the world exclusive premier of our video! We are going to create a resource bank of good practice of supporting parents to become more involved in their children’s education and school community to be shared on our website including videos of parents, schools and parent councils talking about their experiences. The videos will be added to our website but you can see it first at the SLF.

To give you a taster of our session here’s a question from a little quiz we’ll be doing at the start:

What is the most accurate predictor of a student’s achievement in school?

  • Household income
  • Parental involvement
  • Ethnic background
  • Parents’ level of education

We hope you can make it along and find the answer!