Abstract
Introduction and context
This article, as an opinion piece and considers the challenges around leading and managing German Saturday schools in the United Kingdom where, in our opinion, the disengaged, laissez-faire approach of the UK government is very far away from the desirable situation where the state actively endorses community language schools. In our experience, the contributions to language competency, intercultural awareness and inclusion that community language schools already make to society are barely acknowledged by national governments, local authorities and mainstream schools. It disappoints us that substantial complementary learning and teaching resources are rarely exploited by mainstream schools for the benefit of the wider public.
Community language schools, such as our schools, are usually lay organisations, run by groups of parents with heritage language background and operate with very limited resources and guidance. As research referred to in other articles in this special issue has shown, they offer many children in the United Kingdom the opportunity to consolidate their heritage language and become bilingual as well as developing a sense of identity and contributing to educational attainment and expanding career opportunities.
Looking back over the past 6 years of managing and representing the Association of German Saturday Schools (VDSS UK, 2020), it has been rewarding to see the growth in the number of schools, to witness the palpable enthusiasm at our staff development events and board meetings, and to engage in many outreach activities and projects. Yet despite all our efforts and these very tangible achievements, the ongoing sustainability of our German Saturday schools remains precarious with their work tending to be poorly recognised and understood. Without such endorsement, our existence remains insecure. Our informal status outside of mainstream education leaves us permanently struggling for even basic support to sustain and develop higher professional standards. In comparison, there are countries like Sweden where such schools are fully funded by the government (Karnemo and Segerhammar, 2017). In the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW Government, 2020), community language schools are systematically catalogued and form an integral part of language policy. State support and grants are available for setting up and running these schools, staff development plays a central role and pupil achievements are acknowledged through award systems.
How we became involved with German Saturday schools
German Saturday schools emerged in the early 1980s from parent initiatives to provide German tuition and cultural experiences of the German-speaking countries for children of German language heritage in the United Kingdom. How Charlotte became involved with the German Saturday schools illustrates the voluntary contribution to society that the teachers and the schools make. Charlotte’s Saturday school teaching career began when she volunteered, in return for a small payment, to take over a class of 4-year-olds after her younger child had started attending school. Over some 16 years, her teaching has ranged from nursery age children to 16-year-olds, including GCSE and A-level exam preparation, and she has also worked as school director in London.
After living in the Swedish city of Uppsala where she set up the German section of the multilingual heritage language school that was fully funded by the Swedish government, Marianne moved to the United Kingdom with her young family. She was surprised that there was no state support for bilingual families like she had experienced in Sweden, so she founded the German Saturday School Leicester. The Leicester team now also provide language support to mainstream primary and secondary schools such as after-school clubs and exam support.
To promote the sustainability of German Saturday schools, VDSS UK was founded in the early 1980s as an umbrella organisation. It facilitates the exchange of best practice between schools, organises teacher training events, assists school managers and seeks support from diplomatic and cultural representatives of German-speaking countries as well as United Kingdom organisations. We are the current chair and vice-chair, respectively, 1 of VDSS UK and continue to teach at Saturday schools.
Following our election in 2014, our survey of the member schools revealed that approximately 1600 pupils were taught by 160 teachers in 23 schools with between 10 and 240 pupils on role (median 50). About 85% of children had German heritage followed by 4% Austrian and 4% Swiss with 7% declaring another heritage, but all are members of the British public. This pattern was similar among the teachers.
In the school year 2014–2015, 38 German GCSE and 12 German A-level examination candidates came from these schools. These figures increase year on year as schools grow, but there is some reluctance from mainstream schools to act as exam centres for these young people. In contrast to the dramatic downward trend in learning German in mainstream schools, we observe a healthy demand for places in most German Saturday schools, although they are rarely in the public eye. 2
As of January 2020, the number of schools has increased to 31 with a total of around 2300 pupils. Several schools report having long waiting lists that they could not fully meet suggesting the need for more schools. In addition to language teaching, some schools offer activities such as summer schools, adventure holiday trips, choirs, book clubs and lantern walks, as well as German beginners’ classes for parents.
Building on the foundations created by our predecessors on the VDSS UK board, we have started to address the problems of sustainability that the schools face and seek to expand the network. These tasks are particularly difficult especially with the lack of state recognition and support from mainstream schools. In the section below, we give examples of how we have tried to promote school sustainability, support the development of learning and teaching resources, lobby for recognition and raise funds.
How we have tried to promote the sustainability of the schools
Through regular meetings and exchanges with the school directors, both face to face and online, we identify any issues that affect the schools and discuss the scope of work expected or desirable from the board and any long-term plans. In recent years, we have run management-training workshops as a separate strand during our regular staff development events in response to the needs voiced by school managers.
The continuance of individual schools is precarious at the best of times and particularly under threat when members of the school management need to change. In view of this, a non-profit organisation founded by Marianne provides a professional, fully costed management framework for new and existing German Saturday schools that also supports them through personnel changes (The German Academy, 2020). The schools maintain their own ethos, finances and timetable, but their administration is run centrally so they benefit from shared costs for expenses such as insurance, databases, finance management and Internet resources. They adopt common policies and procedures such as those related to safeguarding, health and safety and human resources. Having access to consolidated management knowledge and teaching guidance means they can concentrate fully on teaching and on their communities of bilingual families. Six German Saturday schools (as well as two multilingual Kindergartens and several after-school language clubs) now operate under this umbrella organisation though the materials and supporting information are also available to all German Saturday schools through the VDSS UK website.
Our intent is to avoid new and existing German Saturday schools from having to reinvent the wheel. To address the need to expand the network, we developed a school-founding workshop from which three schools have emerged. An unanticipated side effect was that the workshop content enabled two struggling schools to reorganise themselves and continue. Over the past 6 years, eight new schools have opened, each with a variety of levels of support from VDSS UK based on their needs.
Developing learning and teaching resources
Our concern with the professionalisation of German Saturday schools and our Association and the exchange of best practice to raise standards of teaching has led to the creation of substantial complementary learning and teaching resources. For example, our regular teacher training events are central to developing teaching standards. They provide face-to-face exchange opportunities and all contributions are accessible to members through the website.
We have implemented a new format for the 1-day national teacher training event by inviting outside specialist speakers for the morning session conducted in English to provide a wider context for our community language schools in the United Kingdom. After informal exchange over lunch, the afternoon involves workshops conducted in German led by experienced Saturday schoolteachers about various aspects of teaching. All event resources are made available to our member schools.
To further foster the dissemination of innovative and successful teaching projects, we launched the German Saturday School Teaching Award. Now in its fourth year, we have three awards which are each sponsored by the main German language heritage countries (Germany, Austria and Switzerland). The winning entries are announced and presented at our training events and the projects represent an important part of our teaching resource archive.
The schools predominantly teach pupils who are neither native speakers nor beginner learners of German. The pupils tend to have a reasonable aural command of the language but usually lack reading and writing proficiency. Our aim is to identify and develop suitable pedagogies and resources to teach these students and to make the very best of the total freedom we have with respect to designing an interesting and engaging curriculum that can successfully compete with children’s other weekend offerings, such as sport, drama and art clubs. We disseminate these resources through our training events, the website and social media.
Although we aim for quite informal teaching methods, we want to ensure that children are offered the opportunity to accredit their German proficiency through preparation for GCSE and A-level exams, or other language proficiency tests. 3 We rely on mainstream schools to act as GCSE and A-level examination centres for our pupils, which is increasingly more difficult given the shrinking proportion of schools that continue to teach German.
Lobbying and networking for recognition
With little recognition for the contributions that the schools make to society, we need to influence policymakers wherever this is possible by utilising as many opportunities to lobby and network as we can. We try to attend relevant conferences, workshops and lectures to learn, get involved in debates and make useful contacts. We have given community language school-related talks, for example, at the 2018 and 2019 Language Shows in London, though this all takes our time and money.
We are interested in getting involved in community language policy and like to collaborate with other community language groups with whom we share many interests and face similar challenges and with mainstream schools who tend to be our landlords. We put our experience into a larger context to become involved in detailed discussions about community language policy, public understanding and research in front of large audiences, including international specialists in the field.
The Language Festival organised by the British Academy and The Guardian is an example of this lobbying and networking. Having met a number of people active in language policy debates over the years, Charlotte was invited to take part in a panel discussion in front of invited guests at the British Academy (2014) on ‘Community languages: policy, pedagogy, public understanding’ and in an online panel discussion at The Guardian about better support for community languages (Young, 2014).
We moved beyond the borders of the United Kingdom to join forces in raising awareness. A contact in 2017 from our US-American equivalent umbrella organisation, The German Language School Conference (GLSC, 2020), resulted in reciprocal visits and sharing of experiences. In November 2019, Charlotte travelled to New York to deliver a workshop at the annual staff development event of our American colleagues and took part in a panel discussion between the presidents of the US-American, Canadian and UK German Saturday school networks as well as North American representatives of the German Central Office for Schools Abroad. This event was the first, to the best of our knowledge, international meeting of this nature.
We recently started to use Twitter (@SaturdayUK) to get involved in community language policy and other relevant debates on a national and international scale. This has been particularly interesting as it reveals a range of different national approaches to heritage language teaching around the globe and provides the opportunity to interact directly with stakeholders and to hear about interesting meetings.
How we have tried to raise funds
Many community language schools in the United Kingdom, and across the globe, face similar challenges to their sustainability as we do. As mentioned above, there are some governments (but not the UK) that now very actively support the teaching of heritage languages as this is seen as an important part of identity formation, social cohesion and as economically and politically advantageous.
As an umbrella organisation, VDSS UK also requires adequate resources so that we can continue to achieve our objectives of supporting and developing the schools in the network. The status quo is that membership fees alone fund VDSS UK. These fees cover a limited range of expenses, but almost all the work of the board depends on the commitment of volunteers, which is unsustainable.
With no funding from national or local government to support the education we provide for students in the United Kingdom, we have tried to establish and maintain constructive working relationships with the relevant Embassies and cultural organisations. Some heritage countries support community language tuition in the host country in some form, possibly as they want to maintain language skills among their emigrant communities and view this investment as economically important or simply as a soft power worth pursuing.
These relationships have resulted in the endorsement of our work and some limited sponsorship. In 2015, we managed to raise monies from the German, Austrian and Swiss governments to fund fully our national teacher training event for that year. This happened because of directly lobbying the diplomatic and cultural representatives in London and being able to characterise our network with the help of the statistical information we had collected. However, the funding does not cover our full costs.
Overall, while we have had some success with raising funds for specific projects, the support is quite limited and never guaranteed. Serious and long-standing attempts to obtain more substantial and long-term support from our heritage countries have so far been fruitless, despite the unremitting decline in German learning in the United Kingdom in general, which in our view renders any endorsement of successful German teaching initiatives such as ours even more urgent, especially in the context of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union.
We have also applied for several UK community grants but have not been successful with these either.
What needs to happen now
If community language schools, like German Saturday schools, are to continue to thrive and expand, what we need is recognition of the contributions to language competency, intercultural awareness and inclusion that these schools already make to society. That recognition involves a serious commitment by the government that recognises the contribution community language schools make and the provision of support to sustain and expand the contributions the schools make to society, similar to that provided in Sweden and parts of Australia.
There needs to be better collaboration between mainstream schools and complementary schools like ours. First by extending and developing the availability of mainstream school facilities at weekends and providing access to exam centres in a way that recognises that all our schools are contributing to the education of children in the country. Equally important is greater collaboration and cross-fertilisation through the integration of language learning and teaching in both sectors drawing on the substantial complementary learning and teaching resources in community language schools for the benefit of all through cross-sector initiatives and projects.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
