UCL IOE Confucius Institute have always enjoyed a close relationship with Peking University (PKU), our partner University in China. In November 2020, we launched a new programme in collaboration with PKU’s School of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language. In this programme, the PKU postgraduate students provide remote support to our Confucius Classroom and Mandarin Excellence Programme schools.

Each of the PKU students is paired with a school and its key contact, whether the Confucius Classroom manager or MEP coordinator, provides guidance and training to the students to help them fulfil their tasks.

In the last two months, eight PKU students have devoted themselves to various tasks, such as creating teaching resources, supporting exam preparation, participating in and making contributions to live teaching sessions and so on. They have created much needed authentic listening materials using the core vocabulary in the Jinbu textbooks. One student made a GCSE revision booklet which was welcomed by the Year 10 and 11 pupils. Another student joined a live lesson in which she was met by a year 8 class who sang a Chinese song for her, along with their Mandarin teacher.

The schools on this pilot programme have given some very positive feedback:

She is brilliant
Proactive and Can-do attitude
[…] helping to enrich our remote curriculum
She is excellent […] gives her best effort
She is willing to listen to advice and improve […] It greatly helps us with the preparation of lesson

Xiaoming Zhu, our National Network Coordinator who leads the programme, says the initiative benefits UK schools as well as the PKU students who can put what they have learned into practice. We are now looking into the possibility of rolling out the programme to benefit not only individual schools but also the schools working in clusters.