Contact with Local Politicians

Our A level politics trip to Stormont found our local politicians very interested and helpful. John McAllister of OUP had arranged during his recent visit to Shimna to meet up with the group. Jim Wells was also very positive in his meeting with our students.

Italian and Urdu

We are celebrating this week the return of Italian to Shimna. A small group of students began study with the Open University YASS. This is a scheme which allows school age students to follow units of OU undergraduate courses. The students will take up Italian from scratch, and can pursue their study through to GCSE or A level. We had also been searching for a similar course for the study of Urdu. While we haven't found a sufficiently high quality distance learning course, we have found suitable intensive courses at SOAS, which is a college of the University of London, and hope to sponsor interested students to study there.

British/Irish Sign Language

We are delighted that our course in British/Irish Sign Language is underway in weekly sessions, and is being taken by support staff, teachers and students. It is a really important step to include Sign Language along with all the other languages we teach. The course we are offering can carry right through to a GCSE qualification.