It is a School for Compulsory Secondary Education and Post Compulsory Education (Bachillerato and Vocational Studies) with over 15 years of experience in bilingual teaching and international projects.

Established in Sanlúcar (Spain) in 1992, our school is engaged in a constant improvement in the management of foreign languages, as a means of intercultural communication, awareness of cultural diversity and an important skill for our students’ future careers.

IES Juan Sebastián Elcano has a staff of 75 teachers and nearly one third of them are bilingual specialists. Many of them keep on working on their linguistic update by attending different courses, activities, Official Language School (EOI), linguistic immersions in foreign countries offered by educational authorities, etc. Our teachers are fully committed to the development of bilingualism and always try to present innovative material and resources for our students in order to involve them in the natural and fluent use of the foreign language during their lessons.

The school has become an educational referent in our city due to its well-known academic level both in Compulsory and Post Compulsory Education, its good results in pre-university regional exams (PEvAU), its Vocational Studies on Hairdressing and Aesthetics, as well as its constant participation in diverse international projects in order to widen our students’ way of thinking.

It first started to be a bilingual school in 2005. Since then, the number of groups included in our bilingual system has gradually increased. It is expected that next course all the secondary education groups will be bilingual.

Our school has also been participating in different international projects for over 10 years, such as Comenius (Peterborough, UK, 2010-2011 / 2011-2012), Linguistic immersions in Salamanca, Spain (2014-2015 / 2015-2016), in Ronda, Spain (2016-2017 / 2017-2018) and in Sanlúcar (2018-2019); the Erasmus+ KA229 project, “Rightful Perception of Reality”, along with Turkey, Italy, Greece and Portugal (2018-2021) and finally the Erasmus+ KA201 project, “Bilingualism in Monolingual Contexts” (2020-2022), collaborating with Italy, Lithuania and Romania.

We are currently working in cooperation with other schools from Spain and Portugal to apply for another Erasmus+ KA 229 project which will deal with the relation existing between our culture, traditions, history, patrimony, economy, etc. and the wine production in the local areas of the partners that will be participating in the project.