School Development Focusing on Language in All Teaching

In summer 2012, in cooperation with 14 schools, the Ministry for Children, Education and Gender Equality initiated a development programme to enhance the academic skills of bilingual students. The core of the development programme is continued focus on language in all teaching in order to increase the academic performance of bilingual students.

This report surveys the implementation of the programme and evaluates the effects of the programme three years after the start of the implementation.

The overall conclusion is that the implementation is going in the right direction, but the specific changes are modest. The analysis of the effects of the development programme for the students' results does not provide evidence that the development programme has had a clear measurable effect on the students' academic performance beyond the development that students at similar schools have gone through without the development programme.

The analysis does, however, show positive trends: For instance, strong dissemination of teachers' experience with action learning and a slight increase in the percentage of teachers with experience in Danish as a second language (DSL) guidance. In general, however, the progress may have been too modest to expect a measurable effect on the students' academic performance.