Head of Department: Mr Jon Drury jdd@sevenoaksschool.org
The Russian Department
Sevenoaks has one of the leading school Russian departments in the country. Nearly 100 pupils study Russian throughout the school from Year 8 to the Upper Sixth, and the department continues to grow year on year.
We are a department of two: Mr Jon Drury and Mrs Elena Kelly, a native speaker. Our pupils often benefit from slightly smaller than average classes, and common fears about the difficulty of Russian are swiftly allayed, as pupils are thrust into a world of strange cyrillic letters and beautiful slavic words, and immersed in Russia’s enigmatic culture. Results are consistently excellent, with 80% of pupils achieving A* at GCSE over the past 5 years, and no one achieving less than an A.
We regularly have students who go on to study Russian at Oxford and Cambridge, or for whom Russian has fired their imagination to study other challenging languages such as Arabic.
There continues to be a real buzz about the department, and its unique character continues to attract and retain some of our brightest and best students.
Year 7
Russian is not currently offered in Year 7.
Year 8
Russian has been offered in Year 8 since September 2011. Out first class of 19 pupils have had a wonderful year, making incredible progress linguistically, although for many the highlight has inevitably been our ‘pancake day’ in Sennocke boarding house!
Year 9
We normally run one set of beginners Russian in Year 9. From 2012 there will be two sets – a beginners set and a continuation set for those who started Russian in Year 8. By mid-September, the beginners have mastered the reading and writing of cyrillic script, and progress continues to be similarly swift throughout the year. Lessons are designed to be fun, and more challenging aspects of grammar and language are presented in an accessible way. Our continuation set continue to build on the firm foundations of their Year 8 course.
Years 10 & 11
The vast majority (90%) of those who study Russian in Year 9 elect to continue with the GCSE course. There is no IGCSE available, so we follow the very straightforward EdExcel GCSE Russian syllabus. We use “Vnimanie” and “Marsh” as our main textbook/workbook, and all students are allowed to keep and annotate these. One of the highlights of Y10 is the exchange trip to Moscow and St Petersburg. This year, we will be undertaking a language course in St Petersburg followed by some charity work in Moscow. In Year 11, we aim to take pupils well beyond the rather limited GCSE course, preparing them in part for further Sixth Form study at Standard or Higher Level. We aim to foster a real love for the language, and a genuine affinity for the culture of Russia.
The Sixth Form
There are many options for studying Russian in the Sixth Form.
We offer the ab initio course for complete beginners (or those with less than a year’s experience). The class is usually reasonably small, facilitating swift learning.
For those with GCSE, or 2-3 years’ experience of the language, we can offer B Standard Level and B Higher Level. The course is examined in three areas: oral, reading and written response, and writing. By the end of the Higher Level course, pupils will be approaching fluency. For students studying SL or HL, we currently run a trip with our Year 10s to St Petersburg and Moscow, involving a language course, cultural visits, homestays in familes and charity work in Moscow. Our Lower Sixth pupils then stay for 5 further days, working alongside young children in Kitezh, a foster family village to the south of Moscow.
We give a great deal of support for those who intend to study Russian at university. We integrate Oxbridge-style material into our teaching and run extra lessons throughout the Sixth Form, as well as offering advice on the application and interview process. We have strong links to the Slavonic departments of both universities, and we continue to have great success in this area.
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