Annual Report 2024 - Flipbook - Page 12
During 2024, PPLI also became more involved in supporting the Department of Education with the English
Language Assistant scheme in the context of increasing visibility for a scheme that offers the opportunity to
develop language competency and deliver teaching capacity to the Irish education system, the lack of which is
one factor often cited for removing mandatory foreign language participation. PPLI introduced a series of
measures to raise awareness of this scheme including the production of videos, a social media campaign and
dissemination of a poster across the HEIs.
Encouraging school exchanges is another important part of PPLI work. Despite the challenges associated with
this e.g. increased workload for the teacher, complexity associated with child safeguarding and garda vetting
and increasing difficulty with identifying potential host families, this important activity needs to be supported.
Students need to have the opportunity to be exposed to and engage with the living language as effective
language learning is dependent on immersion, face-to-face interaction, body language and social observation
and the lack of this during Covid-19 has been another factor that mitigated against uptake of foreign languages
in senior cycle.
Other highlights of the year included seeing languages provision invigorated as a result of whole school advisory
sessions, getting positive feedback because of increased engagement with Foreign Language Assistants, and
an increase in the numbers of teachers of the more recently added curricular languages getting registered with
the Teaching Council. A number of teachers at PPLI who successfully completed their registration secured
employment directly with the school through the Additional Allocation Scheme.
Further increase in the remit and scope of work in 2024 brought with it the addition of new team members,
bringing additional experience and expertise to PPLI. This included both core members of the team, associates,
and teachers, each one of whom contributes to expanding and extending the work. We couldn’t do any of the
work without this wider team which also includes you, the stakeholders.
Thank you for all your support and collaboration which is invaluable to each one of us. Please feel welcome to
visit us at the Digital Hub to see how we might further leverage the synergies we have and increase the value
of our work.
In the meantime, thank you also for reading our annual report.
Karen Ruddock
Director PPLI
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- PPLI ANNUAL REPORT 2024 -
