This has been another busy and successful year for the Modern Languages Department. The Spanish Department received The Good Schools Guide award for the best results achieved in A level Spanish by girls at an independent school and was given a special grant for excellence by the Don Quixote association for their language course. In both French and Spanish, all students passed. All students studying Spanish at A level were awarded an A to C grade, which is a commendable achievement.

 51.1% of our French students and 39.5% of our Spanish students achieved an A* or A grade at GCSE, the best results for the Modern Languages Department in the last five years. Let’s hope that this continues in the future!

This February Miss Despas, Mr Moore and Emilie, the French assistant, took seventeen sixth formers to Paris for five days. They visited the main tourist attractions such as Le Louvre, La Cité de la Science, the Sorbonne and Notre Dame;  they also went on a lovely boat ride along the River Seine. Evenings were spent in local restaurants and karaoke bars or watching a French film at the cinema. Despite the awful weather, the students were always in good spirits, happily munching away at French crêpes.

On the last week of term, Ms Missan and the Department  took most of Year 7 to Boulogne for the day, which was most enjoyable. The heat was “au rendez-vous” and all the students were very excited to go to France. We went to the Nausicaa museum by the coast and saw many varieties of fish.    Mr Bueno took the Year 8 to Northern Spain in October for four  days.  Year 10 will have the opportunity to go to France and Spain for a week before and after Easter 2007, while the sixth formers are going to Granada, Southern Spain, in the February half-term.

Sadly, we said goodbye to Miss Despas,  who was with us for two  years and showed great enthusiasm and initiative in all her lessons. She will be missed by both the staff and the students. She is pursuing her career in Indonesia, teaching French and Spanish in a British International School. We wish her good luck on her travels and for the future.  We also thank Emilie and Jorge for being such good language assistants this year and wish them all success in their studies.

A. Mawer