News Archive

Academi awarded £8000 from BBC’s Children in Need fund

Academi has been awarded an £8,000 BBC Children in Need grant for its Mother Tongue project  in Cardiff Bay.  During the coming school year, Academi will work with the three primary schools in Cardiff Bay - Mount Stuart, St Cuthbert’s and St Mary the Virgin – on a programme of creative writing sessions in the new languages of the Bay.

Pupils will have the opportunity of working in Arabic, Somali, Bengali and a number of the other more recent languages of the area.  Kurdish poet Choman Hardi will act as project adviser and help locate writers in a range of mother tongues. Arabic poet Ghias Aljundi and Bengali poet Mir Mahfuz Ali will introduce their own writing to schoolchildren both in its original form and in English translation and they will also lead writing sessions in which children can write in the language of their own hearth. Cardiff writer and educationalist Glyn Scott will assist with the sessions and work alongside the writers and pupils.

The aim is to build respect for literature of all languages and to make children and their families aware that strong creative writing traditions exist in every language. It is hoped that work produced by local children during the year will appear in shops and offices, in local newsletters and on school websites.

BBC Children in Need – positively changing the lives of disadvantaged children and young people in the UK.