 Hello, I'm Xavier Warnicke. I'm the Associate Head of School for Students and Nations in our School of Languages and Applied Linguistics. I'm here with my colleague Miriam Hauck to talk about our Open Centre for Languages and Cultures, within which my remit is the support of Indigenous community and heritage languages. Hello, I'm Miriam Hauck. I'm the Associate Head of School for Internationalisation, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, and I'm also the Director of the Open Centre for Languages and Cultures. One priority of our Open Centre is the promotion of the use and learning of the UK's Indigenous languages. We want to support people's understanding of the communities living in the regions and nations of the UK. This aligns directly with the OU's social justice mission, as the learning we offer empowers marginalised groups to participate in society and to access services and, importantly, education. One example is our work on the Scots language. Scots only received official recognition as a language in its own right in 2015. Although it had been the official language of Scotland in the Middle Ages, it has since been mainly excluded from public life and was only spoken in the community. To revitalise Scots, we developed two major initiatives. In 2019, we launched a badge open course for the general public, which since has attracted over 25,000 visitors from 90 countries. Our second initiative is designed to bring the Scots language back into education. We are developing a professional development short course for teachers from primary and secondary school from any subject area. It upskills teachers to bring Scots language into their teaching. It is the first of its kind as an online course and it carries a professional recognition award from the General Teaching Council for Scotland. In its 2020 report, the Council of Europe highlighted this initiative as the best practice example of helping the Scots language survive. Another example of this work is our community languages project. This came about because OU students contacted us through our student association and suggested we teach some of the languages spoken in Milton Keynes. So we have started developing a taster course in Tamil. It is the most widely spoken Indian language in Milton Keynes. 0.8% of the MK population have it as their mother tongue. We are actually producing the course with members of the Tamil community. And you might find it interesting to hear that Tamil speakers in Milton Keynes come from Sri Lanka, South India, South Africa, Mauritius and Malaysia. We will be launching this course in July this year to celebrate South Asian heritage month. The total Tamil population in Milton Keynes is presently estimated to be about 6,000 people. There are three Tamil schools in the city and pupils can even get a GCSE in the language. The idea is similar to that of the Scots project. Raising awareness of other languages and cultures and of people with other identities living at the heart of our society. We want to encourage Tamil speakers to perfect their language and English native speakers to learn the languages of the community, but at least to get a taste of it. Coming back then to our open centre for languages and cultures. In its name we mention cultures and language learning is closely linked to learning about other cultures. So our languages short courses also offer insights into the many different cultures associated with the languages, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Welsh. And we've already mentioned Scots. We also offer bespoke short courses in intercultural communication and short courses in artificial intelligence, which are directly relevant to industry, the workplace and our own staff. At the same time we are exploring business to business opportunities with the Open Universities Business Development Unit and our faculties external engagement team. All of this comes with a systematic scholarly inquiry into the design, production and delivery mode of the short courses, including learner reception of this innovative product. The insights gained from the inquiry will inform sharing of good practice and hopefully the rollout of this new model elsewhere in the OU. And this is actually quite timely because there's currently a university-wide redesigning production program for core curriculum on the way.