Meet the Director of Bridge Mills Galway Language Centre
Can you tell us about the inspiration behind starting your language centre?
I actually didn’t start Bridge Mills Galway Language Centre. I came here first and foremost as a student and I did my teach training certificate here. Then I returned after that and I worked as a teacher. Then I left for a while and returned and worked as Director of Studies and then took over the school in 2009.
And so at that point, having been a student and been a teacher in the school, my idea was to bring the the academic qualities that I had seen develop and that I’d learned in other places and I wanted to bring that academic excellence and control it and bring it to the forefront of the management of the school.
So my inspiration was to improve the management of the school with academic excellence from what I’d learned myself as a teacher, a Director of Studies and student.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced when starting your business, and how did you overcome them?
I think the immediate challenge when I started was that the school in 2009 was in decline. It had a reduced number of students and it was at a tipping point really of whether it was going to close or whether it was going to succeed. So I had to take on the function of managing a business that had a good history, but was in decline, needed rejuvenation and restarting and then move it forward and do it while still looking at the academic side of things, which is where I was coming from and keeping the academic standard, keeping the academic excellence that was there, but marry it with good management principles so that there was a sustainable business into the future and that was the first real key challenge that I faced in 2009 when I took over the business.
How was your centre evolved since its inception?
This school has always had a small population of students, and dealt with a small number of courses. Since then the school has grown and I would say now we are a medium-sized school and we have expanded the types of programs that we offer from just general English programs to include teacher training programs, Erasmus programs, Business English programs – a variety of different kinds of language programs and also then obviously expanded to provide the other kinds of things that students need when they come, such as support with accommodation, knowledge of the local area, support and structure for visa requiring students when they come, when it comes to applying for jobs, CV support and all of the other kinds of things to come with the medium-sized school. I think the development of the school has come from that small cohort of students from that small-sized business into a medium-sized, more rounded business that gives full support to students with a variety of different types of courses.
What values or principles guide your company’s operations?
I think as a trained and experienced teacher and academic manager that all of those principles are the things that guide the development of the school into the future and so essentially at the heart of everything we do is the student. It’s really about student-centred support in all of the activities that we participate in and bringing academic excellence to the forefront to support the student in their learning pathway. We do that through, obviously, assistance to students inside the classroom and outside the classroom with non-academic-based activities, but also we continue to invest in training and professional development for all of our staff, academic and non-academic staff, to ensure that excellence and support is kept in place for any student who comes to the school at any time.
How do you maintain a strong company culture, and why is it important to you?
When it comes to thinking about what we do and reflecting back on what I just said regarding student centredness, then everything has to revolve around quality and the management of quality within your centre. And your company culture then has to grow and develop around that idea of maintaining a quality standard in everything that you do. Those quality standards are maintained through continuous training and development, but also through accreditation with external organisations, example, having quality assurance with QQI (Quality and Qualifications Ireland), which is an external inspection process that allows you to develop your quality is inspected externally and is supported externally through external inspection. We also hold Equals Accreditation, which is very much an organisation focused on student quality, but whole school quality and appropriateness. So, having those external brands helps you to develop the quality standard, and that quality standard then feeds into your company culture, which is based around the supporting of the student who’s the centre of all of the classes that you are involved in.
How do you foster collaboration and teamwork within your company?
I think that’s a really good question because I think that collaboration and teamwork and the importance of it and how to develop it is something that we really focused on or had to focus on during covid. It wasn’t something that we necessarily reflected too much on before, but then when the pandemic hit and everything changed, both in terms of our working community and our student community, and being unable to interact so easily as we had done before by being physically present in the same place, meant that we really had to think about and work on communication, intercommunication and making sure that everybody was on the same page with the same information. And so bringing the team back into the workplace, everybody in the same place, the idea of collaboration and teamwork came back with us from that dispersed location, geographical location that we were in. And now we very much invest in ensuring that there is time for meetings, that there is time for intercommunication, that teachers are fully informed about the students that are coming, the requirements that they have, the needs that they are looking to have fulfilled while they’re studying with us. The whole team is on board then to understanding the pathway for the student through the school and the need for communication and intercommunication between teams. And we do that by face-to-face meetings but also by online where needed to make sure that everybody is kept on the same page with the same information at the same time.
How do you incorporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility within your company?
Those are very important key points to have to think about and when I think about some of the programs that we run in terms of the social responsibility which has become more evident to us in the last number of years particularly following the number of migrants that have come into the country through displacement from other countries like for example the Ukrainian population at the moment. So we have started working with educational training boards and we have started providing Cambridge examinations on a peripatetic basis for Ukrainians who are based all around the west of Ireland. The idea of corporate and social responsibility interchanged very easily with the model of what we provide at Galway Language Centre. We’ve always looked at sustainability within the school in terms of how we reduce our carbon footprint and the things that we do. And that can be done through very simple things like recycling points throughout the school, monitoring of how we use electricity, changing our heating and lighting system, which we’ve invested in inside the school over the last number of years, to reduce our electricity usage, and then thinking about sustainable options for students in terms of encouraging students and staff to walk to school, cycle to school, use public transport and make sure that all of that information is available to students before they come to us so that they can then bring the idea of sustainability with them and implement that with us as they study with us at the school.
What do you personally consider to be the benefits and opportunities from Erasmus plus the participants and institutions in Ireland.
I think the great thing about Erasmus in general and the thing that it achieves for participants and for institutes is the spirit of cooperation and the opportunity for cultural learning across different education systems whether that is the mobility of students from one place to another or the communication between organizations working on projects together it’s the idea of looking at how things are done in Ireland and how you do things in your school in a particular way, and then comparing and contrasting that with a colleague or an organization that you work with that works in a similar field of education but maybe approaches how they do things in a completely different way. So you have an opportunity then to learn from their systems to improve how you do things and it gives you an opportunity to have that viewpoint of another way of looking at something that leads to an end point with an overall better quality product from your point of view and how you think about things. It is that intercultural exchange and cultural learning that Erasmus brings both at personal and corporate level, which I think is the best benefit of the Erasmus scheme.
What can participants hope to achieve by attending an Erasmus+ professional development course at your Bridge Mills Galway Language Centre.
It depends on the candidate who’s traveling. We had students who studied with us, all Erasmus trainees from Reunion Island who were looking at language development programs and fitted quite easily and simply into the language programs and the kinds of language development programs that we have here at the school. Whereas when I thought about some of our Swedish and Danish trainees, they were focusing on CLIL and an approach to CLIL inside the classroom, reflecting on CLIL as they understood it from their viewpoint and CLIL as we understand it from our viewpoint here then we had students from Poland for example in Eastern Europe who were very interested in Irish culture and they were doing an Irish cultural course that developed their knowledge of Irish culture that they could then bring into their classrooms in Poland in the secondary school and third level organizations that we’re working in. Our German students were interested in 21st century skills and the development of those kinds of skills both from their own personal development point of view but also looking to incorporate those kinds of skills developments in the classes that they taught. And then overall, I think for any of the teachers who come on training courses for general improvement in their teacher training skills they can see by either shadowing some of the work that we do here with some of our teachers or learning about techniques and methodologies in the classroom. I think it really depends on the clients, the students who’s coming, the needs that they have in terms of what they want to develop, how they want to develop professionally or otherwise, is it a business skill, is it a teaching skill, or is it a cultural short development that they want, and then fulfilling that requirement for each of those individual students and their individual needs.
What are your goals and aspirations for the future of your business?
I think in the next 12 to 24 months at Galway Language Centre, we’ve just got authorisation to run CELTA courses with Cambridge and so that will further develop and enhance the teacher training programs that we offer both for teachers, novice teachers who are learning and getting certification, but it will also feed into the teacher refresher courses that we offer to students who are studying through Erasmus and develop skills in those areas. We continue to develop our Cambridge outreach and peripatetic delivery of exams across the west coast of Ireland. We are now delivering exams in six different counties outside of Galway and meeting students in lots of different areas and supporting them and how they do it. We want to continue to work with the migrant community and Ukrainians who are based now in Ireland and we’re supporting them through the provision of free lessons geographically here on site here at the school but also connecting with them on online platforms. We are exploring the possibility of a small-scale Erasmus Key Action 2 project where we’re focusing on the development of teacher training skills to give more recognition to the LGBTQ and trans communities both from the point of view of those working within those communities but also the students in our environments who may be from those communities where we are not giving appropriate reference or appropriate training to how they’d like to be treated, where they’re not seeing themselves represented in teacher training materials and how we can maybe be more inclusive in our classrooms to include all types of communities within the work that we do. And also we have new accreditations coming with the international education mark which will start to evolve and develop over the next 12 to 24 months. So there are lots of opportunities there for further professional development for us as a school, for us as an organization and for the quality market which I said connects very centrally to the the student which is the core that we do at Galway Language Centre.
Learn more about Bridge Mills Galway Language Centre