LT Extra: NCLE

by | May 26, 2026 | Languages Today extended content

One year after they launched, 14 National Priority Projects (NPPs) coordinated by NCLE’s schools-led Strategic Learning Networks have been yielding some exciting results and replicable good practice.

 

What can the NPPs teach us about coming out of our shells? Bringing our pupils out of their shells is our goal, of course – but also as teachers, we can benefit from expanding our horizons too!

 

Here are some examples.

 

What are NCLE’s NPPs?

These DfE-funded initiatives combine on-the-ground action research in the classroom and backed up by academic expertise from researchers at UCL Institute of Education. Each NPP is led by an NCLE Strategic Learning Network school (SLN) and designed to tackle both national priorities and local needs.

 

Pupils: growing in confidence and speaking more

In Kinder Language Network’s Sing to Speak project, even pupils predicted Grades 1–3 at GCSE showed a marked increase in oral participation during structured activities. Speaking confidence rose from a mean score of 2.0 to 4.3 on a five-point scale, and qualitative data noted ‘increased willingness to speak, improved fluency and reduced hesitation.’ The project explicitly aimed to ‘reduce anxiety associated with GCSE speaking tasks’ by making practising feel creative and low-stakes. Some pupils independently revisited songs outside lessons — a strong sign of intrinsic motivation.

 

Pupils: Feeling happy, valued and understood

The Thames West Language Network piloted a narrative-based KS2 German teaching programme using the Goethe-Institut’s Wuschel resources, finding that it transformed pupil confidence, motivation and progress in a way that one headteacher described as bringing more inspiration and joy to his 20 years of primary leadership than almost anything else.

One Year 3 child said the lessons ‘make me feel happy,’ a Year 5 pupil said ‘we are so lucky!’, and a Year 6 pupil urged the team to ‘keep going! It’s brilliant.’  100% of teachers rated their KS2 pupils as ‘very confident’ in German after 12 months. One parent wrote: ‘I can see her vocabulary and confidence in speaking grow week by week.’

 

At Wells Learning Network, multilingual pupils who had previously been expected to ‘leave their language at the door’ found their home, heritage and community languages actively brought into lessons through translanguaging. Pupils reported feeling ‘recognised and valued’, their identities no longer treated as invisible but as genuine assets in the classroom. The school recorded leaps in the cohort’s attendance, behaviour and completion rates: ‘We are talking about students who are more outside the classroom than in the classroom, and yet in those lessons they stay.’

 

Previously excluded pupils finding their place

One of the most striking examples from the NPPs is the Roma Room created by Swanswell Language Network. Roma Gypsy students, who had previously experienced high levels of internal truancy and behaviour points, began attending a weekly lunchtime gathering where they could share their culture and traditions. One pupil said: ‘This is our chance to show people that we are not like they say we are,’ while another added: ‘No one really knows about our gypsy tradition and we’ve not been able to speak about it to anyone.’ A third described simply being together and talking about what matters to them as their favourite part of school. The school says: ‘This space allows us to investigate the root causes of disengagement and truancy’.

 

Pupils: Broadening horizons and new aspirations

The Solent Language Network organised a ‘Languages at Work’ day in Portsmouth, and the effect on pupils was spectacular. A Year 9 pupil said it ‘opened our eyes about opportunities.’ A Year 6 pupil, surprised they could enjoy sport and languages at the same time, said: ‘I enjoyed the football session — it made me realise I could play and learn languages.’ A Year 10 pupil said: ‘I would like to live abroad in future and use my languages in my career.’ One primary MFL teacher described Year 6 pupils returning from the event ‘with a renewed enthusiasm for language learning and a sense of how languages can truly open doors to the world.’

 

Teachers: Connecting with other schools through SLN communities of practice

The West Midlands Supra Network offers a particularly clear illustration of what cross-school connection can look like in practice. Network leads described how, rather than each SLN running its CPD in isolation, they jointly planned and co-delivered teach meets across different locations on different days of the week to give teachers more flexibility and choice. They cross-promoted each other’s events and actively encouraged teachers on one mailing list to attend events run by neighbouring networks. This kind of peer-to-peer infrastructure meant teachers who might previously have felt isolated within their own department or school suddenly found themselves part of a much larger regional/national community of practice actively invested in the same questions as them.

 

Teachers: Accessing research-informed practice through UCL Institute of Education

The NPPs gave classroom teachers something that is rarely available to them: structured access to current research, mediated by UCL Institute of Education and woven directly into their project design. For example: The Lakes Language Network grounded their target language work in research by Dr Colin Christie and phonics research by Associate Professor Robert Woore, applying the research as a live framework shaping what teachers deployed in classrooms in rural Cumbria. Kinder Language Network’s project drew on Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis and Paivio’s dual coding theory to predict why AI-generated songs reduce speaking anxiety, giving teachers a principled rationale for what they were observing empirically in the classroom. Beeleigh Language Network engaged with Dörnyei’s research on L2 motivation and the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF)’s metacognition literature to redesign the use of feedback in their teaching.  For many participating teachers, having UCL Institute of Education’s imprimatur on their work also changed how they were perceived within their schools as it helped elevate their projects to the status of evidence-based, university-endorsed professional action research.

 

 

Non-specialist teachers discovering they can

One of the most striking ‘coming out of their shell’ moments across the NPPs involves teachers who didn’t consider themselves language specialists at all. Thames West Language Network ran a teach meet for 36 primary ITT trainees across four London boroughs, with remarkable results. The lead trainee provider said: ‘You took an area that many experienced primary teachers approach with some uncertainty and made it engaging and accessible. Trainees left feeling that language teaching as a novice practitioner is achievable — no mean feat.’ Trainees themselves said the session proved they ‘don’t have to be a native speaker’ to teach languages confidently. This is a genuinely significant outcome in that this NPP shows a pathway for effective upskilling of non-specialists in a way that is positive, motivating and hugely impactful in their schools.

 

These are just a few examples! We’d love you as an ALL member to explore the results of our NPPs in more detail, think about how they could be useful for you, and get in touch.