Schools should 'restore compulsory language learning'

Baroness Coussins, crossbench peer and chair of the APPG on modern languages, writes for ePolitix.com ahead of her question for short debate on the importance of modern languages teaching.

I believe that every child in the 21st century will need some level of competence in foreign languages every bit as much as they will need science, maths and IT skills. Only six per cent of the global population are native English speakers and 75 per cent speak no English at all. Three-quarters are multi-lingual, and they are the ones who will get the best jobs, run the most successful businesses, make more friends and influence more people.

UK employers are increasingly forced to recruit overseas because our own school-leavers and graduates simply don't have the language skills they need. Schools which allow students to drop languages at the age of 14 – and that's the vast majority of state schools – do our young people a great disservice by preventing them from acquiring one of the skills which will most enhance their future employability.

Only seven per cent of lesson time for 12-14 year-olds is spent on languages, which puts England joint bottom of a league table of 39 developed countries, alongside Ireland and Estonia and behind Indonesia and Mexico. English is really important, but it isn't enough. It's even declining as the language of the internet, whilst web material in Chinese has multiplied fourfold in the last decade.

I'll be asking the minister in today's short debate to take the opportunity of the forthcoming review of the national curriculum to launch a national recovery programme for modern languages. The Languages Ladder should be used to restore compulsory language learning up to age 16.

If the coalition government is serious about wanting to plug the 'vast gulf' between state and independent schools, languages would be a good place to start. They also need to revive the plan to make languages part of the primary school curriculum, which was a casualty of the pre-general election wash-up process.

And finally, they need to take action to reinforce the status of modern languages as 'strategically important and vulnerable' subjects at university level. Language departments are facing severe cuts at some universities when they ought to be, alongside the STEM subjects, at the heart of strategic investment.

Article Comments

Have your say...

Please enter your comments below.

Name

Your e-mail address

Listen to audio version

Please type in the letters or numbers shown above (case sensitive)