About

About Me

After graduating from university with a degree in Economics, I spent three months living in Berlin, studying beginners’ German. I continued to learn German alongside roles in sales before working for a year as a Fremdsprachenassistent at the Ernst Abbe Gymnasium in Eisenach, Thuringia. On my return to the UK, I worked at Rolls Royce Deutschland for three years, using my German every day. It became clear to me that those with foreign language skills — especially German — were consistently offered more opportunities.

In 2012 I completed my teacher training in Primary Education with German at Newman University and was offered a job teaching Year 1 at my placement school. Teaching younger children gave me an excellent grounding in the strategies I still use today for teaching beginners. That summer, I took part in the Internationaler Sommerkurs at the Universität Erfurt and shortly afterwards passed the Goethe-Zertifikat C1 in Berlin with a particularly high grade in spoken German.

From 2014 I became the German Teacher at The Oval Primary School in Birmingham, teaching around 360 Key Stage 2 pupils each year. In my very first year, I was honoured to receive a Special Mention at the German Teacher Awards for “setting standards of excellence in the teaching of German as a foreign language in the UK,” presented by the German Ambassador Dr Peter Ammon (pictured above, provided by the German Embassy, London). My time at The Oval was dedicated to sparking a love of German through creative, interactive lessons.

After leaving The Oval, I spent a year teaching English online, where I was featured on the homepage of the DaDa website as a Star Teacher. It was with DaDa that my love of online teaching truly began, and where I started building the catalogue of online strategies I still use today.

I then began teaching German online and developed my own curriculum, Time for German. Since then, I have taught over 1,000 children aged 7–12, earned nearly 500 five-star reviews, and been recognised as both a Star Teacher and a Popular Teacher for my engaging and effective lessons.

As a former class teacher of 6-, 7- and 8-year-olds and a co-operative learning specialist, I have spent years refining strategies that make German engaging and accessible for beginners. The result is a unique scheme of work that now forms the backbone of Time for German — over 100 lessons that take children from complete beginner to intermediate, while building confidence, curiosity, and a love of languages.

Viel Spaß beim Deutschlernen!

Sean Sullivan