UK Celebrates 25 Years Of Bilingual Education

Britain’s Bilingual Education Program with Spain has been crucial to the increase in Bilingual students

TDS New – More than 40,000 students are enrolled this year in the Bilingual Education Program (Spanish acronym: PEB) – a pioneering learning project in Spain of an integrated curriculum that is a benchmark in methodological innovation in language teaching.

“Teaching and learning a foreign language does not simply involve reproducing speaking models. It is a question of transmitting culture, of bringing the culture of study language to the culture of the country of origin, and of eliminating clichés and prejudices and contributing to the acceptance and valuing of diversity and difference”, highlighted the minister.

“We are reforming our education system and in this project the development of linguistic skills in several languages should not be limited to a select few, but present an opportunity within the grasp of all students. This is our aim and projects such as the one we share with the British Council are fundamental for achieving this”, concluded Minister Celaá.

For his part, the Director of the British Council, Mark Howard, underlined the English language as a vehicle for mobility and employability in global society. “Today’s world needs people that can see beyond the obvious and appreciate this difference as a source of wealth. That is precisely one of the strengths of this project: in working on and developing the cross-cutting skills and competences of students. In this regard, language acts as a means to channel thought (critical), to helps verbalize ideas (communication skills), to explore new paths (creativity) and to contribute to providing a response to the challenges of today’s world (problem resolution)”.

Set up in 1996, the Bilingual Education Program is an education project that teaches an integrated Spanish-British curriculum. The aim is to teach students to be capable of fluidly expressing themselves in different cultures and languages within the context of a multicultural and multilingual Europe, providing them to that end with a set of strategic, linguistic and sociolinguistic strategies.

90 public nursery and primary schools and 57 secondary schools

This comes within the framework of the collaboration agreements established between the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (Spanish acronym: MEFP), the Delegation in Spain of the British Council Foundation and the regional governments that develop the programme.

The PEB is currently taught at 90 public nursery and primary schools and 57 secondary schools, distributed over 10 autonomous regions, and Ceuta and Melilla. In total, it has some 40,000 pupils this academic year, from the second cycle of nursery school until the fourth year of compulsory secondary education.

The number of pupils has doubled from the academic year 2010-2011 to the present.

Within the framework of this celebration of this anniversary, the British Council is organizing the seminar entitled ’25 years of the MEFP-British Council Bilingual Education Program. With the participation of the State Secretary for Education, Alejandro Tiana, and the Director of the British Council in Spain, Mark Howard, it will address the role of the PEB in the change of panorama of bilingual education in Spain.

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