China: Security and Trade (IRDC Report)

Baroness Coussins Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Coussins (CB)]

My Lords, one of the report’s conclusions is that:

“An increased knowledge and understanding of China—including its languages—within Government, the civil service, and the public more generally will be crucial for both constructive engagement and managing periods of stress.”


The committee calls on the Government to provide greater support for Chinese language teaching and cultural exchange with China—an issue also touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad. I declare my interest as co-chair of the All-Party Group on Modern Languages, and my other language interests, as set out in the register.

The government response to this conclusion and recommendation was positive and pointed to the Mandarin Excellence Programme, the MEP, which funds the teaching and learning of Mandarin in state schools, aiming to

“provide an increased pipeline of fluent Mandarin speakers to meet the future business and economic needs of the country.”

Set up in 2016, the MEP has been extremely successful. Indeed, since the Government’s response to the committee’s report was published, the figures have improved still further, with over 8,500 pupils enrolled to date.

GCSE results have been excellent, significantly above the national average, with 91% of the cohort achieving level 5 or above last year, and 72% with level 7 or above. In one north London school with a very mixed intake, the entire cohort achieved level 9. In addition, PGCE recruitment is going well and is back to pre-pandemic levels, which is a lot more than can be said for MFL teacher recruitment more generally.

An independent evaluation of the programme found that it was well-designed and balanced, was achieving its objectives and was having a national impact on the numbers of pupils studying Mandarin over and above those in the MEP schools. Research published earlier this year by Cambridge University described the MEP as an exemplar model which could be replicated for other languages. Even more significantly, in the context of this Select Committee report, it concluded that, if language barriers were removed and more was invested in the teaching of Mandarin, the UK could increase the value of its exports by £5 billion a year.

The UK’s languages deficit has long been acknowledged as one of the barriers to export growth. In the SME sector alone, there is good evidence that language capabilities add 30% in value to success in export growth. The UK’s deficit inhibits both recruitment and employability. The CBI has said that better foreign language skills are critical to increasing the UK’s global competitiveness and ensuring that young people have the high level of cultural awareness that supports a successful career. The Government are to be congratulated on supporting the MEP.

The reason I wanted to speak today, in the context of this report, is to caution against throwing the baby out with the bathwater by responding in a disproportionate way to pressure to ban the Confucius Institutes which support the MEP, and instead to work with Taiwan rather than China for the teaching of Mandarin. These concerns have been expressed by the China Research Group of MPs and the Foreign Affairs Committee of the other place, and several others.

The Confucius Institutes have been described as effectively an arm of the Chinese state, which I have no doubt is a perfectly fair assessment, but the implication that they are having some sort of undue influence over the UK students learning Mandarin with the MEP in our state schools is, I suggest, rather wide of the mark. We should be clear that these worries are not shared by the students, parents, teachers or head teachers involved in the MEP.

Katharine Carruthers, the director of the consortium consisting of University College London’s Faculty of Education and Society, which actually delivers the MEP in conjunction with the British Council, points out that the DfE contract for the programme is with UCL, not the Confucius Institutes. In addition, every school participating in the MEP is responsible for engaging its own teachers locally, in exactly the same way as they employ teachers of Spanish, French or indeed anything else. The teachers are not provided by the Confucius Institutes; they do supply guest teaching assistants from China, but these are supplementary to the core classroom teachers. Some Confucius Institutes, however, also engage with Mandarin teaching in universities, and it is there that there is a potentially legitimate concern that some universities need to exercise caution to ensure that Chinese studies there are not influenced or delivered by Confucius Institutes.

There would be a major practical challenge to the support of the development of Mandarin teaching in schools if there were a switch to Taiwan from China, with obvious significant geopolitical ramifications too. The MEP’s main practical challenge at the moment has been in sustaining pupil visits to China, because of Covid restrictions, but a comprehensive programme of virtual interactive learning with the help of 16 universities right across China has been able to fill some of that gap. It is difficult to see how this could be matched by far more limited Taiwanese institutions and resources.

In conclusion, I ask the Minister two questions. First, will he ensure that his colleagues in government, across various relevant departments, are fully briefed on the importance and success of the Mandarin excellence programme and understand that the role of the Confucius Institutes should be seen in its proper perspective, and that any action should be proportionate and properly targeted, given the actual structure, control and delivery of the programme in schools by UCL and the British Council? Leave the schools alone and let them get on with it—but, at the same time, closer monitoring of the situation in some universities is clearly advisable.

Secondly, I understand that government funding for the MEP has been guaranteed until 2024, with an expectation that it will be extended for a further year to 2025. Will the Minister confirm this and commit to pressing the strong and positive case for continued funding after 2025? This would be good for schools, good for our young people and their future employability and, as the Select Committee report concludes, good for UK-China relationships, not just in security and trade but in the all-important intercultural understanding that underpins all those geopolitical challenges.