Finlayson School
Nurturing the first language
The staff at Finlayson Park School provide educational programmes in several different languages as they have a strong belief in nurturing a student's first language as a bridge to quick and effective learning of a second language (English).
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Finlayson Park School is officially known in the Ministry of Education as a Bilingual School. We are a large multicultural decile 1 school of 900 students.
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We have several different types of teaching units:
* Māori Bilingual
* Māori Immersion
* Samoan Immersion/Bilingual
* Mainstream
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At Finlayson Park we value students’ first language and nurture this as a strong vehicle to learning English as a second language. Students can continue to speak, read, and write in their own language as they learn to transfer these skills and become confident enough to speak, read and write in English. This Iraqi child is being taught in Arabic by a teacher aide who speaks the language.
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All teachers make a commitment to learning the philosophies of bilingual education and we all take on further study in bilingual education papers to strengthen this. As a result of this and the support networks within the school, students are very quick to settle and begin their learning pathways towards English.
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At our school we have recognised the need for our students to be engaged in learning with one-to-one, or one-to-two adult support. This means that the annual budget for support staff is huge and supports a total of 25 teacher aides who are closely trained in various support programmes. Many of our teacher aides are of the same ethnic group as our students. This is crucial in retaining the first language of students and to then support them in transferring these skills to English.
