Congratulations to our students on their success in the Mother Tongue, Other Tongue Competition this year.

Mother Tongue Other Tongue is a multi-lingual poetry competition, originally created as a Laureate Education Project by Professor Carol Ann Duffy DBE (UK Poet Laureate 2009-2019) to celebrate cultural diversity and the many languages spoken in UK schools. The competition is run annually and within regions, the Eastern Region being organised by Routes into Languages East in partnership with Cambridge University's Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages.

There are two categories: Mother Tongue in which young people are encouraged to share poetry in their first language (an original piece, a poem, song or lullaby they have heard); and Other Tongue in which young people learning a language are invited to write an original poem in that language. We are fortunate at WHSB to have such a diverse community with many of our students being bilingual. The 2024 competition saw a record number of entries with 27 students from WHSB shortlisted for the Finals event at the University of Cambridge in March this year. Of our finalists, eight were awarded prizes within their category:

Mother Tongue: Saifan, Muktadir, and Aric for their entries in Bengali and Oliver for his entry in Cantonese.

Other Tongue: Harry for his poem in German, Sam for his poem in French, Daksh for his poem in Spanish, and Quinn for his poem in German.

This is a fantastic achievement for our finalists and prize winners and we congratulate them all.

With our thanks to Mrs Williams and colleagues within the Modern Foreign Languages Department for preparing the students and facilitating the School's entry to the competition.