Primary languages in initial teacher training (ITT)

This Ofsted survey evaluated the quality of ITT providers in preparing new teachers to implement the National Languages Strategy in primary schools in 2009/10.

Key findings:
- The ITT courses surveyed are providing good quality training for future languages specialists in primary schools. Trainees are being prepared well to become teachers of languages and for their likely role as languages coordinators.
- These complex courses make high demands on providers and trainees. Effective communication and cooperation at institutional, local, national and international levels underpin the best provision.
- Trainees are highly motivated and very committed to making languages in primary schools work. They show an evangelical determination to win over those who remain unconvinced of the benefits of early language learning.
- Although trainees are developing an understanding of the challenges for pupils when they transfer from primary to secondary school, few trainees have firsthand experience of how secondary schools build on earlier learning in languages.
- Trainees gain significantly in confidence and maturity as a result of their four week placement abroad. Working in two educational cultures enhances their ability to reflect critically on their practice.
- The trainees are mostly competent in their teaching language, and the best provision ensures that they continue to develop their expertise. Despite this, they do not use the foreign language sufficiently with pupils in the classroom.
- Trainees focus mainly on their own teaching language. Many of them do not know enough about the other languages spoken by pupils in their classes. Most training providers do not place enough emphasis on this ‘bigger picture’ of languages.
- A shortage of specialist mentors means that many trainees do not have sufficient opportunities to observe good languages teaching and to receive expert feedback on the elements of their own teaching specific to languages.
- Primary schools have benefited from the opportunities the providers have offered for mentors to be trained, but they express concerns about the sustainability of this training initiative up to, and beyond, 2009/10.