French

Course summary

The benefits of studying a language are wide-ranging: from learning to communicate in fresh ways to have a window into the culture of another country, from learning to express your views and listen to the opinions of others through the language that you are learning to study its culture through a variety of modern media. By learning to manipulate a language to generate your ideas and responses, you will broaden your horizons and appreciate the variety that other languages offer. Delivering presentations and being able to summarise your reading skills that go well beyond the classroom. Demand for linguists from employers and top universities is also growing – for example, in the recent CBI report (Stem Skills), top businesses rated advanced qualifications in MFL as being very desirable to improve the UK’s engineering outlook. Within the department, there are many opportunities to spend time in the countries where our languages are spoken and plenty of contact with native speakers who visit Solihull: French • Five-day immersion trip for Sixth Form students to Normandy. • Enrichment trip to Paris • Exchange with our partner school in Bourg-en-Bresse Spanish • Students have the opportunity to host a peer from Argentina every two years in May (from Colegio Yapeyu). • There is a further opportunity to go to Peru to work with the charities LAFF and Otra Cosa for six weeks in the summer holiday, after the Lower Sixth. • We also offer Upper School and Sixth Form trips to Andalucía. German • A biennial culture and language trip to Berlin. • Strong links with our partner school in Hofheim. • Responsibility for our in-house German magazine ‘Genau’. • Opportunity to undertake work experience in Frankfurt, organised via our partner school.