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I wish to thank my colleague Isabel Nisbet for chairing today.

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Before joining us here in Singapore last year,

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Isabel was the chief executive of Ofqual,

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the regulator of qualifications and examinations in England.

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She advises us now on developments in educational policy

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and thinking in the Asia-Pacific region, and she contributes to international discussion

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and debate, not only chairing but also as a speaker in her own right.

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It is a pleasure and an honor to work with her, and I'm delighted to invite her now

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to open the debate today.

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Thank you very much, Ben.

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Good afternoon and welcome to those of you who are here and those of you who are watching on the internet It a particular pleasure for me to be here In my days as a regulator of examinations I used to have to go to broadcasting occasions

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where there were three subjects that they expected me to talk about.

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One was cheating, one was dumbing down, and one was wrong grades.

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And those were the three subjects I was expected to know about and nothing else.

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It is a pleasure to be talking about education and to be thinking particularly today

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about language education.

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As Ben said, one of the aims of this kind of occasion

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is to bring together, both online and in the same room,

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policymakers, academics, and school practitioners

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to think of some of the key topics

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that affect education in the Asia-Pacific region.

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And really what we're wanting to achieve for all of us,

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including those of us presenting and those of us taking part,

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is to think, to be helped to think,

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what does the research say?

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What does it have to say to my context?

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What is the experience

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of other countries in the Asia-Pacific region, what does this have to say to my context and

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what do I have to say to them?

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And to go away with some heightened questions and understanding in your mind and having

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had a chance to benefit not just from the speakers but from meeting and talking with

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your fellow participants.

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That's quite ambitious but that's what we want to achieve today and thank you for joining

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with us to do it.

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And we could not have chosen a better subject to start with for this first seminar.

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Bilingual education, cognitive benefits and policy into practice.

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If there ever was a hot topic in the Asia-Pacific region, we've got it.

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At the policy level, language education has been seen of having not only intrinsic importance,

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but instrumental importance as an instrument of foreign policy,

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as an instrument of strategic policy as an instrument of economic policy as an explicit means to global competitiveness And those of us who are joining who are like me now I pleased to say live in Singapore will recognize that theme

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And also any of you who've read what I'm holding up for the participants here is the Australian

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White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century, which is very recent, will have seen what

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it had to say about the importance of language in making Australia a globally competitive

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nation.

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There's also quite a lot of issues about language as an instrument of national policy in all

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of our contexts here, of national social policy as a means to social cohesion and racial harmony,

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as a way of developing characteristics that we want our young people to develop, for example,

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respect for others and empathy, and many see language and sharing language and sharing

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each other's language as a means to that, or also as part of a national strategy for

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teaching national values and national heritage and encouraging people to love their motherland

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that comes with it. Language is a rich part of all of that.

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Also, it can be part of a national educational strategy to improve educational outcomes in all subjects,

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including the native language of the country, and those who have been reading with interest, as I have,

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the Malaysian blueprint, which was published recently, will see some of those themes there.

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So all of those are resonances with the importance of language in the policy curriculum in the Asia-Pacific region.

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And we are very well equipped today to look at some of these issues.

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Peter Mahisto, who we're going to be welcoming in a minute, is an international global expert on bilingual education and its benefits, and will speak to us about that.

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He has worked in more countries than I can list here,

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including Estonia and Canada and England and parts of Europe,

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and has worked and taught at all levels of education And then we going to hear after the break from Professor Amy Tsui who is from the University of Hong Kong

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and she will be talking about the policies into practice bit

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and helping us to share our context with the experience of other countries.

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What approaches have been tried?

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What is the research?

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What is the evidence of what has worked and what hasn't worked?

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What has proved successful?

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What have the obstacles and the challenges proved to be?

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and what are the techniques and strategies for addressing those.

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And we know that people around this room and in the expanded room of the internet

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will bring to their own experience some of the experience of having strategies

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for teaching just a small number of students other languages

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or requiring all students, however able and however willing, to study those

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and the challenges associated with each.

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and not forgetting the underlying issue of teacher development, professional development,

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and competence, which underlies everything that we're going to talk about. So we're

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I'm going to talk a little bit before, particularly before tea, about what the benefits are and what the evidence is,

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to start thinking about whether that rings bells with us, and then the policies into practice.

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There will be a short time for questions after Peter's address, and then after Amy's, both Peter and Amy will join us,

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because there will be a lot of common themes.

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And in terms of some of the ground rules for making this work, when we get to the question and answer bit,

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I will ask you if you'd like to ask a question if you're in this room to put your hand up

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and if you're watching online the chat function will come on

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just when the question and answer session begins, not now.

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But at any point I'm told if you're a Twitterer, if that's the right verb,

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you can do so and communicate any points or questions you want to raise

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whether you're here or whether you're watching online

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using the hashtag

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hash

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C that hash Cambridge Asia Singapore Cambridge Hong Kong That the one So I hope you going to be able to do that

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So I'm now very pleased to welcome Peter Mahisto.

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Peter, as you've seen from his biography, has got experience across the world.

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He is the author, and we're very pleased, among his many works,

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of this volume, which there are bargain copies of outside,

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Excellence in Bilingual Education, a Guide for School Principles,

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which was developed with our colleagues in Cambridge International Examinations.

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I have read this book with great enjoyment and interest,

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and for those who haven't, I do recommend it.

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So we're particularly interested to hear what Peter has to say to us

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about the cognitive benefits of bilingual education.

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you