Written by: Mark Levy, Head of English Programmes, Spain

The Bilingual Education Programme (BEP) was launched in 1996 with the Spanish Ministry of Education to provide wider access to a bilingual and bicultural education for children across Spain. Based on the education offered by the British Council School in Madrid, the programme reaches 40,000 students in ten autonomous regions of the country. In the landscape of education, evolution is inevitable. The programme had witnessed exponential growth and recognition over the years, however, as time progressed, it faced the inevitable reality of evolving educational paradigms and shifting priorities within regional governments. For programmes to remain relevant and impactful, they must adapt to changing circumstances, reevaluate their purpose, and redefine their strategies. Such is the journey undertaken by the pioneering BEP in Spain, which, after experiencing remarkable success, found itself navigating new challenges and opportunities. 

From the beginning of the programme our vision had been to provide high-quality bilingual and bicultural education in English and Spanish. In 2018 we felt there was a need and an opportunity to enhance it to be a model of excellence for quality and inclusive bilingual education across the country, which would support and prepare young people to contribute to, and be successful in, a multilingual and multicultural world. With this in mind, we needed to gain the support of our leading stakeholders. We set up a series of focus groups with our primary stakeholders in regional governments and the Ministry of Education, and head teachers and teachers within our programme across the country. Through this research with these key stakeholders, we found that the reputation of the programme was extremely strong and that there was still considerable advocacy for it, and this enabled us to move forward focussing on community, quality, sustainability, inclusion, and research. 

Our next action was to re-engage with the community of schools and teachers in the programme so that we could help them feel that they were part of something bigger than what they were doing in their classroom or their school. We launched a newsletter to inform the community about training opportunities and to feature stories from participating schools, as well as debuting a series of competitions for primary and secondary schools to encourage them to interact with each other. Another important aspect of community building, and the reinvigoration of the programme, were the regular school visits we embarked upon to develop a better understanding of the day-to-day reality of teachers in our programme. This enabled us to improve our teacher development offer and better support teachers to help their students achieve the desired learning outcomes. As 2021 marked the 25th anniversary of BEP, we produced a special edition of the ‘Hand in Hand’ magazine, celebrating the impact of the programme through stories from schools, participants and alumni.  

The school visits are an important part of our stakeholder engagement and help us build and sustain a feeling of community and involvement amongst the teachers and pupils in the 148 schools in our programme. Visiting the schools and speaking and listening to the leadership team, the teachers and, where possible, to the pupils, is almost always followed by an increase in the number of teachers engaging in our training offer, signing up to our newsletters and sending pupil’s work into our competitions. Sometimes it is just an opportunity to remind them of what the British Council offers, but mostly it is an opportunity for them to tell us how they are doing, show off the successes of their learners, and let us know how we can support them better. The visits demonstrate to the schoolteachers how valued they are as a school in the programme. It is also often motivating for the learners to have someone different come into their classes who they can talk to.  

These visits helped us to develop and deliver a new series of training covering key areas of the programme. This included induction courses for new teachers, such as a Small Private Online Course (SPOC) for Early Years, a renewed focus on teaching literacy using age-appropriate storybooks, and an underlying and ever-present focus on inclusion. The Covid pandemic also made us look at training delivery models and we ran several online webinars to support our teachers through the crisis. During this period we also conducted a series of online panels with schools and policymakers to look at assessment, inclusion and quality assurance for bilingual education, from which we were able to produce a self-evaluation framework for school leaders and an updated curriculum.  

Through the school visits, conversations, and training courses we understood that there was a need for updated guidelines to support teachers and schools by clarifying and exemplifying the methodological approaches of the programme and clearly embedding these in Spanish Education law. We started at Early Years and consulted with internal (British Council and BEP) and external experts, and our Early Years Guidelines were published by the Ministry of Education in 2022. The Primary Guidelines will be published this year, and the Secondary Guidelines will follow. 

Our research has always been a fundamental component of the programme and, as part of this process of development we were undertaking, we looked at ways in which we could enhance it further. This included developing a model whereby universities could collaborate with us to gain access to the bilingual schools that are part of our programme. In return, the universities share their findings with both the participating schools and the British Council. Through this model all parties were able to learn from the results, which we used to inform further development and refinements of our programme. We also commissioned and facilitated multiple research projects that all contributed to increasing the knowledge base of our communities. This includes a completed study investigating the attitude of parents towards bilingualism and students’ outcomes. We also have several ongoing research projects, including investigating the attitude of teachers towards teaching science subjects and student outcomes with the University of Valladolid, and the standardisation of assessment study partnering with the Autonomous University of Madrid. We have a continuous commitment to research to inform our programme and share knowledge and we are currently partnering with the University of Cordoba to find out if students in bilingual programmes understand the benefits of it, working with sixth form and university students. 

BEP was the first national bilingual programme in English and Spanish. Now every single region in Spain has a bilingual programme and they have all referred to the success of BEP as being a model that they learned from. English, across the country, is now being used as the medium of instruction for various subjects in primary and secondary schools, in addition to being taught as a foreign language. In essence, the journey of reimagining the programme epitomises the resilience, adaptability, and enduring commitment of its stakeholders. Through visionary leadership, community engagement, and a relentless pursuit of excellence, the programme has emerged stronger and more purposeful than ever. As it continues to chart new horizons, it stands as a beacon of innovation and inspiration in the realm of bilingual education.