Schools across Venturers Trust are celebrating International Mother Language Day today – a wonderful opportunity to recognise the richness of our diverse community.

Dozens of children from six Venturers Trust schools have shared some words in their home language for this fantastic video; and schools have organised various activities throughout the day, such as parents and carers sharing a story or a song in their home language, a poster-making competition and a language survey.

Through ‘International Language Day’ Venturers Trust hopes to raise the profile of language diversity across the Trust, as it continues to strive for “all children, all backgrounds, all succeeding”.

Katy Isaac, EAL (English as an Additional Language) lead for Venturers Trust, said: “The video features more than 30 home languages, but these are just a fraction of all the languages represented in our schools. We want to encourage a sense of pride in being bilingual or multilingual and would like to see EAL pupils using and maintaining their linguistic repertoire. As well as being important for a child’s sense of identity, there are many benefits to speaking more than one language.”

International Mother Language Day is part of a United Nations initiative ‘to promote the preservation and protection of all languages used by peoples of the world’.