Spanish on a roll in Britain; more kick-starts for languages in primary schools; exam success in community languages there for the taking - this is the big picture that emerges from a quick survey of the 12 UK projects that have won a European Award for Languages this year, including three which earned special awards from British Telecom, the Spanish Embassy and the Mary Glasgow Trust. There were four winning projects in each of three categories: primary, secondary, and further and lifelong education.

Looking closely at individual prize-winners, however, it is clear that most of the projects were simple, few were outlandishly expensive, and none had extraordinary inputs of time or expertise. They often made new bricks from very familiar pieces of straw, and many have elements that are easily imitated. Indeed “replicability” - along with innovation and effectiveness - was what the judges demanded.

The award, a Europe-wide initiative sponsored by the European Commission, promotes best practice in language learning. It is supported in the UK by the Department for Education and Skills and co-ordinated by the Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research. Winners were presented with certificates and languages teaching materials. The ceremony was held at the Spanish Embassy in London on September 26, the official European Day of Languages.

At Brooklands Primary School, Sale, Cheshire, pupils have for the past three years had the opportunity of an hour of Italian every week in Years 4 and 5. Do parents mind the loss of literacy time?

“No,” says the deputy head, Phil Cottis. “The scheme is funded by the Italian government, and the teacher, Laura Lorelli, is provided by the Embassy. And now we have links with three Italian schools in Bologna.”

Similar, but not the same, is the award-winning project based at Impington Village College in Cambridgeshire. It has acquired language college status, so funds are available for a certain “Monsieur ‘iks” - David Hicks, a lively teacher who uses mime, music and rhythm to teach French - to tour the primary schools, delivering an hour a week for Years 3 to 6, so the pupils will have a grounding when they come to Impington. The college also provides master classes on site for prospective pupils whose schools David Hicks’s tour cannot reach.

On a bigger scale is the partnership project between Merseygrid, a private company supplying education and community services (www.merseygrid.com), and Liverpool LEA, which has provided language courses for 4,000 primary children in the city. The languages offered are French, Spanish and Italian, and the teachers are trained through “live” sessions and video-conferencing. A unique feature is that some teachers start to learn languages informally with the pupils at their own primary schools. The aim is to build up a sizeable bank of primary teaching expertise in the three languages. This project won an additional award of pound;1,000 for its use of ICT from British Telecom.

Liverpool primary school children also delivered the theme song for the awards ceremony. Liverpool is twinned with New York, and the song, which represents all the religious beliefs in Liverpool, includes the now poignantly relevant lines: “In a world whose conflict knows no bounds Listen to the distant sounds of six thousand languages in harmonycalling for peace and democracy.”

Josephine Mullen, a member of the Merseygrid team and author of the lyrics to the song, is delighted about the prize, but feels that what is needed is a national policy to broaden language learning across the country - not just a series of small initiatives.

On an even bigger scale Kent County Council has shown what you can do if you invest pound;1,000,000 over more than a decade in foreign language-teaching in primary school. With France only 20 miles offshore, Kent is a county which has to be European-minded. Glynis Rumley, primary modern foreign languages project officer, believes that the key has been “the provision by the Advisory Service of high-quality teaching materials and in-service training year after year”. And Kent children may soon have French-style handwriting - some teachers are crossing the channel to find out how French children learn their instantly recognisable script.

Two of the secondary award-winning projects facilitate the learning of community languages. In Wolverhampton, the Jennie Lee Professional and Community Centre runs at least 50 Saturday morning classes in 20 primary and secondary schools, teaching no fewer than six languages - Panjabi, Urdu, Hindi, Gujurati, Bengali and Ukrainian. “Parents are pleased when children can keep their cultural identity,” says Naresh Chandla, who co-ordinates the project.

Robert Clack School in the London borough of Barking amp; Dagenham has also realised the benefits of enhancing pupil attainment in community languages. Claire Smith, support teacher for ethnic minorities, managed to find teachers to deliver an increasing number of community languages last year, and the pupils duly delivered 23 A-C grades, 14 As and three A*s. The value of doing an early GCSE is immense, she believes. “Once they get one under their belt and know what exams are like their confidence soars.”

Two projects in North Wales won awards for secondary schools. At Ysgol y Moelwyn, high in the mountains at Blaenau Ffestiniog, Bruno Guillemin has created La Gazette de Blaenau. This is an online magazine published in French and English and shared with a partner school in the Pyrenees, the College at Bourg-Madame.

In another project, video-conferencing is the key to solving a shortage of Spanish teachers. Pupils work in groups of four to seven in 22 different schools all over North Wales. They get lunch time lessons through video-conferencing, and e-mail and fax are used for ancillary work. The expertise in video-conferencing has been developed by Christine Allen for CYNNAL, the advisory service for North Wales, based at Llangefni on Anglesey. This project also won the Spanish Embassy prize for the promotion of Spanish.

Christine Allen says: “Video-conferencing can never be the best way to learn a language - going to the country, or having a boyfriend or girlfriend from there is much more effective, but learning by video-conferencing is a lot better than not learning the language at all.” She feels that we are only at the start of discovering what ICT can do for us in language-learning. So far she has learned that “the younger a distance learner is the harder it is to keep up motivation and concentration. The challenge is to make it seem as if the teacher is in the room with the pupil”. The judges were in no doubt that she had succeeded: they felt that the project had managed to create “a relationship between tutor and pupils which is as good as in a conventional classroom”.

An interesting variant in the provision of community languages comes from one of the Northern Ireland award-winners in the further and lifelong education category. Gael-Linn, a non-political, non-governmental organisation based in Armagh, which promotes languages, and Irish in particular, has recently been doing so in Protestant schools which do not normally study Irish. Over eight weeks, sessions are given on place-names - focusing on the school’s locality as much as possible - and on the derivations of surnames. The strong Protestant role in the revival of Irish is also underlined.

In Nottingham the LEA and Nottingham Trent University have got together to help Spanish into some local primary schools. Trent has links with Salamanca University’s school of education at Avila in Spain, and primary teachers have been going there for an intensive two-week course in Spanish. They can also study at Trent University and some of these are now competent to introduce Spanish into their schools.

Spanish appears again in a brilliantly simple use of e-mail to teach, so far, 500 subscribers world-wide. Each day Fernando Perez Cos, a London-based language researcher, e-mails a palabra del dia, a word-of-the-day, to his subscribers, with a simple commentary. The judges thought this wonderfully uncomplicated idea had considerable potential.

A remarkable project in County Fermanagh is the inspiration of college lecturer Joan Major, which involves the local college of further and higher education sending out a language van equipped with PCs, CD-Roms and audio tapes to the furthest corners of the county. Some students from beyond the border with the Republic of Ireland also travel over to visit the van. The languages on offer are French, German, Irish, Spanish, Italian. The van gives learning chances to isolated, deprived or house-bound people in rural areas.

Many public spaces in Fermanagh have sectarian overtones, but the “Languages Bus”, which is neither Catholic not Protestant, neither green nor orange, neither Irish nor British, is broadly popular. It also proved popular with the judges, who gave it the coveted Mary Glasgow Trust award.

* The closing date for applications for next year is April 30, 2002. For an application form contact European Award for Languages 2002, CILT, 20 Bedfordbury, London WC2N 4LB. Tel: 020 7379 5101 ext 244. Fax: 020 7379 5082. E-mail: euroaward@ cilt.org.uk Web: www.cilt.org.uk projectseuroawardabout.htm