A LESSON on culture has been taught to pupils at a Worcester school.

Youngsters at Blessed Edward Oldcorne Catholic College learned that it is not just languages that make the world go round when they took part in a cultural awareness workshop recently.

Jayne Baliman-George, a language and cultural trainer based in Bromsgrove, visited the college to encourage pupils that keeping up their language skills and being aware of cultural differences could improve their job prospects and increase future travel opportunities.

Mrs Baliman-George, who has provided language and cultural training to well known organisations such as BMW and Rover, ran an interactive session with year 9 pupils to test their knowledge of customs and etiquette from around the world and encourage them to continue studying languages.

This event took place as part of the business language champions programme. The programme, run by the Regional Language Network, aims to bring the world of work to the classroom to raise the profile of languages.

Mrs Baliman-George said: “I was delighted to have the opportunity to explore this subject with the pupils and share some of my experiences.

Hopefully they now appreciate the importance of cultural awareness and will be more interested in continuing their language studies with an eye on new horizons.”

Claire Parker, head of languages at Blessed Edward, said they were extremely grateful to Mrs Baliman- George for her input.

She said: “We were thrilled to have someone with such a diverse language background as Jayne in college. She really showed us how learning languages can lead onto to an exciting and fulfilling career and can also help us to achieve better global understanding.

The pupils really enjoyed doing something completely different.”