Your opinions, experience and knowledge are urgently required!
As you might be aware, the country has seen the lowest number of Modern Foreign Language Assistants starting this October for the last three or four decades. There are multiple reasons for this, including the decline of languages at GCSE and A-level as well as budgetary decisions in schools, academies and colleges.
The Association for Language Learning is working closely with other partners on getting a much clearer picture on what is actually happening on the ground… I would therefore like to ask you to spend just a few minutes of your time to complete this survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FLAsurvey2015, which shouldn’t take you more than 5-10 minutes. I would also be grateful if those of you who have come up with alternative models could let us tell about these in the survey. The survey is part of a British Council commissioned review of Modern Foreign Language Assistants programme with a view to refreshing this programme.
This survey on Language Assistants is a specific piece of research, and separate from the Language Trends Survey which some of you may have been invited to complete. If you have been invited to complete the Language Trends survey, it would be fantastic if you could complete both. We apologise for making this extra demand on your time, but the more intelligence we have of what is going on, the better informed we are!
As the review period is rather tight, could I kindly ask you to respond to this survey by the extended deadline of Thursday, 12 November 2015 at the latest. As an Association, we are committed to represent members’ views in policy discussions and therefore your view on this matter is extremely important to us.
Many thanks for your support in this matter and I wish you a successful and enjoyable week,
René Koglbauer, ALL President (2014-16)