We are delighted to announce that we will host our fifth annual Festival of Languages from 8th January to 31st March 2025, with support from the North East Combined Authority and a wide range of local, regional and national partners.
The Festival celebrates diverse languages and cultures and our connections to the world by providing engaging and inspiring events, activities and resources for schools and groups. In 2025, free Festival activities will be open to schools and groups in Newcastle, Northumberland, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Gateshead, Sunderland and Durham. We will offer access to webinars to any UK schools and there will also be links to national competitions and resources available anytime.
In 2025, the Festival will include three large scale creative language projects (running January to the end of March), plus activities in March including:
- world languages and cultures events
- language and culture taster sessions
- language experience sessions on campus with universities
- languages and careers events and resources (webinars will be open to all UK schools)
- pre-recorded activities for younger learners
- national competitions and freely available languages resources (shared on the Festival website)
We will have some new partners delivering activities in 2025, joining our partnership of contributors from across the region and UK. We are also expanding our Steering Group to include more representatives from across the North East Combined Authority area, which is the geographical focus for the 2025 Festival.
This website currently hosts all the details of the 2024 Festival programme and will be refreshed at the end of the year. The 2025 Festival programme will be live on the website in January 2025, when we launch our creative participatory projects and registrations will be open for bookings for events and activities taking place in March 2025.
Follow us on social media for all the latest news about the 2025 Festival: X/twitter, facebook, Instagram
What is Express Yourself: North East Festival of Languages?
We are the only regional Festival of Languages in the UK. It is made possible by our many partners who deliver events and activities and provide resources free of charge and thanks to our Steering Group who volunteer time and expertise to develop and co-ordinate the Festival.
The Festival’s aims and objectives are to:
- promote the value of languages and language learning for children and young people as global citizens
- increase cultural awareness, nurture curiosity and inspire children to take up and progress with language learning and embrace cultural and linguistic diversity
- broaden horizons and widen opportunities for their education and career choices and their future lives in an increasingly interconnected world
- build connections between schools and universities and local, regional and national organisations who support languages and intercultural awareness.
We have built engagement in the annual Festival since 2021, with our largest ever participation in 2024, when 37,633 children and young people from 419 schools were involved.
You can see the headlines from this year’s festival here and also download the 2024 Festival Report here.