 The Ministry of Education, Innovation, Science, Technology and Vocational Training for the Curriculum and Materials Development Unit, CAMDU, recently held a national language policy implementation planning virtual conference. The virtual event, which was streamed via the Ministry's YouTube channel, brought together language professionals from across the Caribbean region. Angel Caglin is the Curriculum Specialist at CAMDU. We are very grateful that we have been able to get a selection of wonderful resource persons who can, from across the Caribbean, who can give us some idea of what our considerations should be for implementing the language policy, what are some best practices that they have observed, what the research says about implementation of a policy such as this one. So we really are looking forward to hearing from them and putting together our ideas for how our national language policy for solution should be implemented. The discussions focused on a draft policy developed under the OECS USAID Early Learners Program, ELP, based on feedback from across section of the St. Lucian Society. Linguist and Projects Coordinator Consultant with the Folk Research Center, Melissa Irving, presenting on the socio-linguistic context for St. Lucia, highlighted that based on research, there is a demand for the Creole language to be taught formally. From my own data collection, as it was mentioned, I was focusing on the English-based Creole, but I did have the opportunity to kind of move around the country a fair bit and observe from my fieldwork that was mostly in Sufran Viewport. So that's towards the south of the island, mainly working with 13 to 18 year olds more towards the higher end of that scale and up until 2019. From those observations, there was a wide range of different proficiencies amongst the students. Most of them were able to produce at least a couple of sentences. Some were completely fluent. Others, the knowledge was mostly passive. The frequently mentioned divide between north and south in terms of proficiency and in terms of frequency of hearing the Creole were also apparent. And as a note that's kind of relevant for the language policy is that the students that I spoke to at least were very interested in either learning or maintaining Creole. So those who already spoke it and those who wanted to learn it were very interested in seeing it implemented in the school system.