MVC accepted on National Mandarin Excellence Programme
11th September 2017
Melbourn Village College has been accepted on to the national Mandarin Excellence Programme.
It means that each year a group of Year 7 students will start on an accelerated programme of learning the world’s most spoken language with a view to taking a GCSE up to two years early.
Last September, the school became the first in Cambridgeshire to offer the language as part of the Key Stage 3 curriculum. While their peers study the language for two hours a week, from this September the first cohort of 29 Year 7 volunteers will dedicate two additional hours to being taught Mandarin by specialist teacher Frank Fan.
The Mandarin Excellence Programme is run by the Department for Education, University College London and the British Council and aims to have at least 5000 students nationally on track to fluency in Mandarin by 2020.
It is only open to schools rated ‘outstanding’ or ‘good’ by Ofsted and who have shown a strong curriculum presence of Mandarin as well as having a minimum of two languages taught at the school.
Students will be tested annually and will be expected to complete a variety of homework tasks in addition to the enhanced number of hour-long lessons, one of which will take place during Melbourn’s after-school enrichment programme.
However, there are also rewards, with a heavily-subsidised two-week educational and cultural trip to China taking place at the end of Year 8.
Melbourn Principal Simon Holmes said: “This is a recognition of the success of our first year of teaching Mandarin.
“This was an intrinsic part of our original plan in developing Mandarin. We are delighted that we are one of the small number of schools that has been accepted on to this exciting programme.”
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