What is Playbusters Easy Spanish? - transcript

Basically, what I think it's about... It's about parents taking responsibility for the children's play and their educational needs, and influencing services that are already existing, and also linking into those services.

So it's very much about understanding the needs of children, how the parents feel about that and how that we can continue to develop that.

It's not just about the Spanish language as such, but it broadens the horizons, even from that very young age. And, you know, we can see this as developing further as they go into primary schools and into secondary. So that's kind of where we are. We're at the very beginning of that stage just now. We have carried out a lot of groundwork, a lot of research, and, you know, the other thing I would say about the project is: community-led. The parents are at the forefront of this.

So the Easy Spanish project, as we're calling it just now, has come from that, and it's basically come from parents saying, 'We would like our children to develop another language.' They chose Spanish because Spanish is spoken by 400 million people worldwide. Also, they felt that it had relevance to them. You know, for example, Spanish is one of the top ten holiday destinations of parents within the East End. And we feel, you know, that through learning Spanish in... right through from nursery school, then it will increase the literacy and numeracy levels of children.

And also, we're looking at, not just for young children, but really to get this into families, so we're very, very much involved in the family learning. And we would link that in, for example, through learning communities, through libraries. And also what they're learning within the nurseries, within these other environments, that they're able to take back into the home. So parents can learn alongside with their children and, you know, we feel that that's the best way to learn.