Schools and Universities: Language Learning

Baroness Blower Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, on securing this debate and acknowledge the enormous amount of work that she does through the APPG and any other channels to make sure that the question of modern languages teaching and learning remains as high on the agenda as it possibly can be.

Why does the teaching and learning of a modern foreign language matter? This debate is partly about the technicalities of improving the supply chain of modern foreign language teachers since, as we have already heard, 50% of modern languages teachers are now recruited from outside of the UK. However, there is a prior question: why does it matter? As we have also heard, figures from government suggest that there are economic and diplomatic, and so on, very good reasons, at both personal and GDP level, why we should have more and more young people who are proficient at languages. We have figures and research for the value of French and Spanish, but also increasingly German, not to mention Mandarin. Noble Lords will all have heard this from the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, and other places too, and other noble Lords may well expand on this.

These are very good reasons in themselves, but there is another set of reasons for learning a language, one of which is that learning a language is good for you. Many hours of research and research papers have shown that the plasticity of the brain is heightened by learning a language. It increases cognitive flexibility and adaptability, and these are clearly very good reasons and worth while for everyone—even in the later years, should any noble Lord choose to take up a language.

However, perhaps my favourite reason for learning a language is, frankly, that it is fun. With the right pedagogical approach, a classroom in which language teaching and learning is taking place is a fun classroom to work in. It is a real-world skill; it can be deployed, practised and improved by communicating with others in your classroom—from my own personal experience, often to the delight of young people. However, those young people miss out if there are not sufficient, or sufficiently well-trained and qualified, modern languages teachers with whom they can work.

Modern foreign languages have the reputation of being hard subjects because there is a perceived harshness in the marking compared with other subjects. That may or may not be true, but, frankly, we do not hear enough on the aspect that I am really enthusiastic about, which is the fun—although we do not hear a lot about fun in education in general.

This debate is about how to get our schools and universities out of the spiral of decline that the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, talked about. It appears from government figures that there has been an improvement in ITT recruitment to modern and foreign language teaching. However, as the target was lower, and is still only 90% met, and as it comes against a background of very low levels of recruitment over previous years, there is still a great deal to do if we are to arrest the decline of modern language departments at university level.

If there is not a secure base of effective language teaching in key stages 4 and 5, we will continue to have this problem, and A-levels will continue to decline. Recently, a House of Commons committee reinforced the view that teaching is still insufficiently attractive in terms of burdensome workloads, and of course, there are pay level issues. This needs to be remedied. Given the number of modern languages teachers that we need, I ask my noble friend the Minister, as she has already been asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, if the Government will reconsider a visa waiver scheme for non-UK trainees and teachers in recruitment. This would go a long way towards improving our position.

Perhaps what we also need is a national strategy. I hesitate to suggest this, because it seems to be the answer to almost anything that comes before government—“Let’s have a national strategy”—but I do think that it would be worth while. Certainly, we must urgently consider visa sponsoring and the material that schools need to be able to do that.

Finally, I ask my noble friend the Minister to look again at the issue of functional language skills teaching and qualification raised in the Education for 11-16 Year Olds Committee of your Lordships’ House.

[Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Blake of Leeds)]

My Lords, may I draw to everyone’s attention the fact that the timing in this debate is very tight? Could everyone please either go below five minutes or stick to the five minutes’ advisory time? Otherwise, we will not have time for the Minister to respond in full.