The Linguist

30 The Linguist Vol/61 No/2 2022 thelinguist.uberflip.com INSTITUTE MATTERS KidZania's Director of Education explains how his experiences of education have driven his passion to inspire generations of children to learn languages Can you tell us a little about yourself and how you came to be a linguist, Ger? It's going to sound a little odd but I think I've always been a linguist, although I didn't realise it for quite a while. I was born in the south of Holland in an area where we spoke a dialect that was distinctly different from Dutch. It was a six-mile bike ride to Belgium and a five-mile bike ride to Germany, so when I went one way I picked up German and when I went the other way I was in a country where I could speak Dutch, because it's so similar to Flemish. A lot of the TV in Holland at that time was in English – always with subtitles – so I picked up English watching Hilda Ogden on Coronation Street. At school I didn't enjoy languages until, at the age of 13, I had this brilliant German teacher. I was quite a naughty boy and he was a newly-qualified teacher. He gave me a book and said, "Read it! You're too good to just sit in lessons, you've got to go and read." I went back day after day like Oliver Twist and said, "Please sir, can I have some more?" I decided I wanted to be like him and I became a teacher. It took a great teacher to help me realise I was a linguist. I think that's why if someone asked me, "First and foremost are you a linguist?" I'd say, "No, I'm first and foremost a teacher." Tell me more about that, Ger. Once I qualified as a teacher I had a problem. At that time, teachers in the Netherlands were quite rightly well paid – teaching was seen as a profession on a par with lawyers and doctors – so there weren't many vacancies. I saw a teaching job advertised for a year in Norwich and I thought I might as well have a go. So I set off to the UK for one year, which has now turned into 38. GER GRAUS JOHN WORNE MEETS I started teaching and loved it. It was a brilliant school. We had a 'languages for all' programme way back in 1983. Starting with a school in Germany, we set up exchanges. That grew until, as a school with 500 children, we were taking 80 of them abroad at a time for a whole fortnight. I started organising six- week work experiences, and after that they completely understood the value of languages. Not all of them went on to study languages, but they would all tell you that they are more confident, more socially adept, they have a better outlook on life, their horizons are wider, they're confident in trying new things, they're not shy of walking up to somebody and accepting: "I'm going to make mistakes but I know you'll try to understand what I'm saying." That's transferable to so many aspects of life, isn't it – the confidence to try. So what happened next? One of the ironies is that when you're good at something in education in this country, you get promoted away from it. You think you need to become a head of department, which means you teach less. I moved to a school with 2,400 children in a tougher area and became head of the largest languages faculty in the country. We decided every child would learn French, German and Spanish before specialising. It was tough, as the world from which those children came was far removed from the importance of language learning. But we set up links with schools in France, Germany and Spain, and subsidised kids from poorer backgrounds. Thinking back on those years, are there any stories which really stand out? One very special moment came when I was at a conference in Kuala Lumpur and one of my former pupils was giving the keynote address as International Director of Education for a major organisation. He saw me in the audience and told everyone, "By the way, I'm here today because of him." Wonderful. So did you stay in teaching? I moved into leadership, inspection and policy, and was approached by the Secretary of State for Education to become Education Director for South Manchester – based at Manchester Airport. Being at the airport did help, because when pupils and parents said "Why languages?", I could just point to the planes taking off and landing. Then I did something which was probably the pinnacle of my working life. One day, I was sat in traffic wondering how many Shakespeare plays are set in Italy. I asked my friend Julian Chenery (founder of Shakespeare for Kids) and he said 14. We decided to reduce them to 10 minutes each – 5 in Italian, 5 in English – and flew 50 kids and the actor Neil Morrissey to Italy to perform it live on Italian TV. To get there, we auditioned 200 primary school children, who signed up to one year of rehearsals and Italian lessons. I found the DVD last Christmas, watched it and had a little cry. The parents from less well-off contexts hired minibuses and drove there. The commitment of these families was amazing. What an incredible thing to achieve, Ger! So what did you take from that? That the experiences we give children outside of school have such immense value. And that's what I wanted to do. I was asked to become the founding CEO of The Children's University, which was about kids from deprived backgrounds going to museums and

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