As provided in response to Parliamentary Question No. 947, the Department provides support to heritage language speakers at Primary level including:
- through the primary languages curriculum which provides for a diversity of languages spoken in our primary schools
- through "Say Yes to Languages", the primary languages sampler module
All Primary schools in the country have been provided with guidelines to specifically support them with including the home languages of pupils with home languages other than the languages of schooling in the activities of the classroom, and to develop pupils’ intercultural learning. ppli.ie/ppli-primary-guidelines/
In addition to the above, a funding scheme is provided annually for schools (Primary and Post-Primary) to provide support for pupils and students in their home languages. This is provided on the basis that pupils and students can benefit from books in their own language as this supports their literacy, identity and heritage School Library Funding Scheme 2022 | Languages Connect
At Post-Primary level, Summer camps that are funded under Languages Connect are currently running in a number of locations. See Heritage Language Summer Camps | Languages Connect The opportunity to apply for funding was widely publicised among embassies and communities representing the most widely spoken heritage languages and among the universities targeting the lesser taught curricular languages.
Classes are provided by Post Primary Languages Ireland (PPLI) at no cost to the student on Saturdays for heritage speakers attending post-primary schools. These include Polish, Lithuanian, Portuguese and Romanian and funding is also provided to the Latvian community to provide same.
PPLI provide ex-quota teachers to post-primary schools interested in supporting speakers of new and lesser taught curricular languages, and the Department of Education provide incentivisation to schools to offer classes to their students in home languages by way of an additional allocation scheme.
Approximately 1,250 students are sitting Leaving Certificate curricular exams for the first time this year in Mandarin Chinese as an ab initio language and Lithuanian, Polish and Portuguese as heritage languages.
PPLI is fully funded by the Department of Education to implement a range of actions in the Languages Connect strategy.
