Dear Parents,

The proportion of SWALS - Students Without A Language Section - in our school is continuously increasing and has reached a level of approximately 20% of the school population, with a trend of a steady increase each year, reflecting the multicultural background of the ECB and EIOPA staff. In order to address this situation, the School has accepted the Parents’ Association request to introduce the SWALS component in the Primary and Secondary Pedagogical Committees. This is already the case in other European Schools with a comparable SWALS populations. To this end, the School and the PA will jointly present at the next Administrative Board meeting a proposal to add to each Pedagogical Committee one Mother Tongue teacher and one parents’ representative. The PA Board have decided that, to begin with, the two additional SWALS Representatives in the Pedagogical Committees will be the two SWALS parents on the Board, i.e. Andrea Haringová for the Primary and Barbara Soszyńska for the Secondary. The shared objective of this initiative is to take into account in the discussions at the Pedagogical Committees the specificities of the large SWALS population and to work out solutions which will be pedagogically sound for the whole school population. It will provide a better platform for the Mother Tongue teachers to insert themselves in the school community as well as for to the SWALS students and parents to present their views and provide feed back on all issues which may affect them.

It should be stressed that, independently of their obvious specificities, the SWALS are not a separate group inside the school community; on the contrary, they are full members of their respective classes and, as such, they will continue to be represented by the normal channels of parent and student representation. More specifically, this arrangement does not undermine or limit the role of class and section representatives, who will continue to present the views of the whole population. The increased membership of the Pedagogical Committees constitutes a supplementary feedback loop focused on specific issues and will not imply any change whatsoever in the normal channels of parent communication with the School.

A letter sent by Tony Obisesan, president of the Board, to the school can be found here.