A team of talented Year 8 French pupils who are excellent footballers were selected to represent the academy at the trust’s inter-school language event. Pupils were compelled by the Futbol Lingo app’s co-founder Pierce Kiembi’s engaging account of how learning languages has helped him in his career as a semi-professional footballer turned academy coach. They were also inspired to learn about just how many languages star professional footballers, coaches and a host of others involved in the industry can speak and how communication in a multi-international world is key to success.

With the aim of gaining points for participation throughout the day, in competition with our fellow matrix academies, our pupils showed excellent teamwork in preparing and delivering a presentation on why their Francophone countries (France and Algeria) should host a football tournament. Presenting to a group of French teachers, entirely in French, did not daunt our pupils, who spoke confidently about their countries’ food, transport links, stadia and star players.

Out on the pitch, our pupils collaborated with their peers from other Matrix academies, demonstrating their football skills whilst picking up some coaching tips from Pierre and brushing up on their languages as they competed.

Our pupils participated fully, interacting both with the visiting speaker from Futbol Lingo and with French speaking footballers from across the trust. They were so inspired by Pierre that the journey home was peppered with Spanish and Italian words and phrases as the pupils used Duolingo to get a head start on becoming increasingly multilingual, a necessity for future career success.