Silverdale School is extremely fortunate to have students who speak an wide range of languages at home from Gujurati, Persian and Arabic to Urdu, Chinese, Hindi and Turkish as well as a wide range of European languages such as Russian, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and German. Being bilingual is fantastic for students’ brains and has been shown to improve their creativity, focus, decision making and thinking skills in all subjects.

In celebration of this, we are keen to ensure that students have the opportunity to be accredited in as many of these languages as possible. If your home language is not English, passing an exam in your home language can increase your child’s confidence as well as adding to their range of qualifications. In 2021, with support from home, some students achieved grades 8 and 9 at GCSE and one student achieved an A grade at A level. These high grades can be very helpful when applying to university or college or for jobs in the future.

Examinations

Each year in September we invite Year 9 to Year 13 students to elect to take, depending on their proficiency, a GCSE or an A level in their home language. We give them the opportunity to do a mock exam in January to practise and to decide if they are ready to do the exam and, if they are, we enter them for the exam.

In 2022 we had over 30 students taking exams in 13 different home languages. This really is something to celebrate!