ATHENA is currently piloting the WELCOME Project . The project has been developed to meet the needs of schools that have recently aquired new pupils arriving from a wide variety of countries, and with little or no English language.  The school may recently have admitted small numbers of pupils newly arrived to the UK. The challenge for the school is to meet the immediate needs of these pupils and their families with respect to their orientation, assimilation and initial language acquisition.

The approach modelled by the Welcome Project is to use videoconferencing to link common groups of pupils across a number of schools. In this way, a single valuable resource (an experienced EAL teacher or community language teacher) can be shared across several schools at once. The teacher can be in several places at once and the pupils can collaborate across the shared videconferenced sites.

The WELCOME pilot project is a 'proof of concept' venture designed to showcase how the application of videoconferencing can  meet the specific needs of the pupils involved and gauge the logistical and educational gains of using this model of practice.
The Pilot project connects Polish pupils across three primary schools to ATHENA staff, including a Polish teacher. ATHENA has close links with Zespół Szkół Technicznych, in Bytom, Poland. The school in turn has close links with its local primary schools. This partnership has enabled the WELCOME project to gain valuable input from Polish speaking teachers and pupils in Poland who are keen to collaborate with the projects activity and to help achieve its goals.

Thursday 6th December 3pm GMT – Polish families and children in the UK meet with Marcin in Poland. This will test the connectivity with the Codian and identify the ‘look’ and feel’ of the connection and
management of the 5 sites connected (Harborne Hill, Paganel, Chad Vale and St Georges and Poland). ATHENA staff will explain what has taken place in the project so far, what the current task is (and how parents can support their children with this), and what the future plans include (with particular reference to BETT (Thursday 10th January 2008)