Drumchapel High School Pupils Visit Shell

Recently, the decline of modern languages in the Scottish curriculum has been discussed at the Scottish Parliament.  Even though we are an increasingly multicultural country with strong import and export links we have fewer and fewer numbers of the population able to interact in the global environment with any language other than English.  

In 2002 the UK signed up to the Barcelona Treaty agreeing that young people should be learning two languages in addition to English.  Scottish schools are struggling to get pupils to take one.

In the last decade the number of pupils taking French at higher level has fallen significantly and the number of pupils taking Standard Grade French has dropped by 18% in 5 years.

Drumchapel High School hopes to encourage its Higher French speakers with a visit to Shell Shared Service Centre in Glasgow, a successful and growing Multilingual Financial Shared Service Centre.  The visit took place on the 12th March 2008 and was arranged by Scottish Business in the Community's (SBC) Closing the Gap programme - an innovative programme of support run at various schools within the City of Glasgow.

Shell Shared Service Centre - Glasgow Limited is owned by Royal Dutch Shell.  The Glasgow office has over 640 staff that supply accounting services to Shell's Downstream Oil Products Business in 12 countries and to Shell's central offices in London and The Hague.

Fiona Laurie - Recruitment Partner with Shell said "We have staff from 34 countries who speak 23 different languages. Our diverse range of language speaking employees work to specific requirements for each customer and process in each country.  The students will come to the centre to learn more about Shell in Glasgow as well as learning the benefit of having a second or third language in the workplace.  They will get a tour of the building and get to see some of our language speakers in action.  This is the first in many of these types of events SSSC - Glasgow hope to hold as we do more work in the community."

Pupils' feedback from the visit:

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