We have been approved for CLEx!

The power of partnership!! Feeling so positive about what we have achieved together with Nuriye Mertcan, Turkish Language Culture & Education Consortium, Vicky Gough, British Council Arabic Language and Culture Programme with QFI and Pearson.

NRCSE has established the Community Language Examination Centre, CLEx, to enable more students to achieve a qualification in their home or heritage language. In 2020, 1,000s of young people were withdrawn from entering the language qualification they had studied so hard for. In January 2021, when the government announced that summer exams would again be cancelled, the same thing started to happen. Mainstream schools were reluctant to enter their own students for subjects they were not studying in the mainstream school and refused to enter private candidates altogether.

For this reason, working with Pearson, we created a partnership with Turkegitim Konsorsiyomu and the British Council to become CLEx, an approved examination centre for community languages.

We have also been campaigning with the APPG for Modern Foreign Languages, the Association for School and College Leaders and colleagues across the secondary languages area to request that Ofqual consider carefully the situation facing young people studying home or heritage languages. Already an extension to the entry deadlines has been given and students have a further 4 weeks to register. Entry deadline is now 21st March. We await the considered response to the public consultation about how GCSE and A level grades should be awarded this year and what support will be given to ‘private’ candidates.

If you have students in Yr 10 and above who are ready to take their GCSE or A level in Turkish or Arabic and have been unable to find a centre to accept them – we can help. See the slides below and get in touch with the examination team at CLEx exams@nrcse.org.uk