Gaelic medium education information for parents

In Glasgow, Gaelic medium education (GME) is offered in four nurseries - three Council provisions and one funded provider, three primary schools and one secondary school.

There has been increasing interest in GME in the city in the last few years. Education Services have been working to extend the provision and numbers of children in the primary and secondary stages have been increasing.

In GME, all learning is delivered entirely in Gaelic. This is called immersion. At the primary stages, all teachers and support staff speak fluent Gaelic. Children are expected to use Gaelic at all times.

In order to build language competency and confidence, our pupils are involved in an immersion programme in the first three years of their education.  With this form of education, Gaelic is the sole language of learning, teaching and assessment.

From P4-P7, immersion will continue but at this stage English will be introduced as a subject building on the language experiences of the pupils and setting targets for progression in the four areas of development i.e. talking, listening, reading and writing.

The amount of time allocated to Gaelic and English literacy varies as pupils progress through the Primary school but Gaelic is the predominant language of the classroom.

All homework is in Gaelic and it is expected that parents provide support to their children. Parents who are not native speakers should be prepared to learn Gaelic in order to be able to help their children with their school work. These links may be helpful:

• https://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/glaschu-beò-glasgow-life
• https://www.glasgowkelvin.ac.uk/courses/gaelic-beginners/
• www.learngaelic.scot
• www.gaelic4parents.com

Further information on each of the primary schools can be found in their handbooks which are available along with their contact details here.

Catchment GME School

Each address in the city is part of a catchment area for a denominational primary, a non-denominational primary and a GME primary. You can check your address here School catchment lookup. Priority is always given to those living in the catchment area of a school.

The catchment areas for GME are significantly larger than for English medium primary schools - three primary schools cover the whole city. This means that you may not be able to get a place in your catchment GME primary school. Where this happens, we follow our Local School Full procedures. We will do our best to offer you a place in one of the other GME primary schools and your child will be kept on a waiting list for your catchment school.

Placing requests

Placing requests are allocated once places have been allocated to catchment children. We do not normally accept placing requests into stages other than P1 unless your child is already in a GME provision or is a fluent Gaelic speaker.