The participation figures for our third annual Express Yourself North East Festival of Languages are in! In our third year of running this event, we have engaged more children and young people than ever (21,532) with more schools involved (521) and 44 partners providing free activities. We are grateful to all our partners and all those who got involved to celebrate the diverse languages and cultures across the region and our connections with the world.
If you did get involved, don’t forget to complete our short online survey by 15th May to help inform how we develop activities in future (click here to complete the survey).
Our first Festival in 2021 was entirely online due to the pandemic and engaged 11,955 children and young people and 237 schools with 95 free activities. Our second in 2022 engaged 18,125 children and young people and 381 schools, with 156 activities available. This year we have surpassed all of these figures, despite disruption due to industrial action in education and transport.
Our Big 3 creative projects for children and young people aged 7-18 were very popular again this year, with wonderful engagement across the region. The Festival Song video will be available later in May, showcasing children singing in different languages and signing to ‘Just One World’.
The Mother Tongue Other Tongue project was very popular again this year, enabling children to express themselves through poetry and creative writing in languages they speak at home or are learning. The digital anthology with examples of submissions by children across the region is available online now (click here).
The results of the poster competition were shared in April, with young people creating designs which explained to other learners why it is important to learn a language. Click here to see the winning entries.
This year we provided a range of live and pre-recorded activities for children and young people. Pre-recorded sessions from Lingotot in 5 languages, Japan Society London and the French Puppet Shows were popular with young learners.
There was a wide range of live sessions delivered by staff and students Durham and Newcastle Universities, community representatives and organisations exploring languages and cultures from Europe, South East Asia and Africa.
We also welcomed pupils from across the region to the second languages and careers webinar with British Council, inspiring young people to progress with languages to widen their future employment opportunities. New this year and proving popular was the What’s My Language? Quiz from Success4All and The Language Centre Newcastle, with a video of young people from the region speaking in their native languages and the challenge to schools and groups to guess the language they were speaking and where they were from.
In addition to these activities, we were thrilled that 300 pupils from the region’s schools attended the Welcome to the Arab World Day at Northumbria University. Also a special mention for the children from St Paul’s in Newcastle, who interviewed staff from Newcastle United Foundation about languages and careers and have already had 1900 views on youtube (click here).
We provided links to lots of other free resources available, from games and challenges, to education resources and we don’t include these in our figures, but hope that people find them useful and inspiring.
We also ran a range of sessions for professionals this year, including exploring digital tools to improve language access and inclusion, making the most of multilingualism in our classrooms and also the very popular Spanish Teachers’ Day training event with the Spanish Embassy.
We hope to be able to run the Festival again next year and will be starting work on this from June. Thank you again to all who provided activities and who participated in the celebration.