On 24th February the year 9 language ambassadors enlisted the help of other members of their forms to organise and run an event in celebration of International Mother Tongue Day. It is a day when we celebrate language diversity and variety worldwide. It remembers the killing of four students from the University of Dhaka on February 21st 1952 because they campaigned to officially use their mother tongue, Bengali, in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) and it encourages people to maintain their knowledge of their own mother tongue whilst learning another language.

At Sir Thomas Rich’s we looked at other languages spoken by year 9 pupils. They included Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Japanese, Irish, Cantonese, Hungarian, Kurdish and Swahili. These pupils took on the role of teacher and taught year 7 pupils a little of their language and its culture. We are fortunate to enjoy such rich linguistic and cultural diversity at Sir Thomas Rich’s and it was a pleasure to see the pride with which the students passed on a little bit of their knowledge to younger pupils. Congratulations to all involved for their hard work and enthusiasm