Margot becomes a Governor of Redhill School

I am delighted to have joined the board of governors at Redhill School. Quite a few of my friends are parents of children at the school and all speak very highly of their experience. The results speak for themselves with 66% of children achieving grades A* - C at GCSE including Maths and English.

I attended my first Governors meeting last week. We received a presentation from Martin Orton, head of languages at the school. I learned that you can now deploy a ‘Talking Pen’ to improve your French accent. You trace the pen over some copy and it speaks the words it picks up.

The other surprise was how far advanced we are in some ways compared to many other countries in Europe. Redhill is twinned with a school of similar standing in Dusseldorf. They have a traditional text book based approach to learning, with no use of white boards or other information technology. This lack of technology is found in other countries with whom Redhill conducts learning exchanges, with many pupils abroad not having access to a computer.

Information technology is not the answer to everything, but increasingly it is the medium through which answers are found. So it was encouraging to find that in one area at least, British education leads the way.

BUT we are only talking about Europe. I am sure it is a different story in the Far East. One of the school’s objectives is to offer Mandarin Chinese. I think this is very important as there is little doubt that when todays GCSE students reach their thirties China will be dominant. The difficulty is finding someone to teach the subject. I think the answer will probably be to recruit a Chinese national who has teaching qualifications in Mandarin and bring them over here. But we would have to be sure of the demand to justify that sort of investment.

I was very impressed with the international exchange programme, the opportunities for language students to travel and add to their learning by living in the country where the language they are studying is spoken.

Languages are very important to business in my view, we have a poor record in the UK, which will of course be worsened now that the government have decided that languages are no longer compulsory. Although English is the international language of business you cannot rely on it for managing all your relationships abroad. Commercially there are always circumstances where knowledge of the native language will be an advantage.