Schools and Universities: Language Learning

Baroness Coussins Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Coussins]

That this House takes note of measures, such as visa waivers, to improve the supply chain of qualified modern foreign language teachers and the sustainability of language learning in schools and universities.

[Baroness Coussins (CB)]

My Lords, I start by declaring my interests as co-chair of the APPG on Modern Languages and honorary president of the Chartered Institute of Linguists which, along with the British Council and the British Academy, supports the APPG. I am a languages graduate myself in Spanish and French and a current student of Arabic at the FCDO’s excellent language centre.

My intention today is not just to stand here and recite complaints and problems about the teaching and learning of modern languages but to propose constructive, practical and achievable measures for repair and improvement. Neither will I go into great detail on the importance of languages, because I know that the Minister is already well aware of their value, not just as part of a balanced, enriching curriculum but for the benefit, security and prosperity of the UK as a nation. As the statutory guidance for the national curriculum says,

“Learning a language is ‘a liberation from insularity and provides an opening to other cultures’. It helps to equip pupils with the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life”.


I will cite only a very few facts and statistics to summarise this broad sweep of a case for languages before turning to the practicalities of the remedies.

First, research from Cambridge University has shown that, if we spent more on teaching French, Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin in schools, the UK could increase its export growth by £19 billion a year. Other research shows that the lack of language skills in the workforce costs the UK economy the equivalent of 3.5% of GDP. Secondly, students who have spent a year abroad building their international and cross-cultural experience as well as their language skills are 23% less likely to be unemployed after graduation. I am of course delighted that the UK will be rejoining Erasmus+, which was and will again be one important factor in the potential supply chain of MFL teachers.

Thirdly, it is a myth that everybody speaks English. On the contrary, only 5% of the world’s population are native English speakers and 75% speak no English at all. AI and machine translation are no substitute for human communication, with its nuance, slang, humour and accuracy, which trump AI tendencies to confuse and hallucinate, confuse numbers and names or fail to deal with dialects or tonal languages.

But the fact is that, however desirable we might make languages at school, and in whatever format they are prescribed or assessed, it is all meaningless if we do not have anyone to teach them. The teacher supply chain is the key to the sustainability of languages in schools and universities.

My focus today is on how to remedy the dramatic shortage of language teachers, how to cut through the vicious circle we are in, where GCSE take-up has stalled, so A-level take-up has fallen, so applications to do languages at university have plummeted, so more and more universities are scrapping language degrees and fewer and fewer potential UK-trained language teachers are being produced. It is like that song “There’s a hole in my bucket”, where you end up with the same problem you started with, despite having gone round and round in circles with a series of steps to mend it.

Even if every single one of the students currently doing a language degree went into teaching, we still would not come close to meeting the shortfall of qualified teachers. Only 43% of the Government’s recruitment target was met in 2024. Although the published target for 2025-26 has been 93% met, I am afraid this is only because the target itself was cut by nearly half—so not really anything to write home about.

We badly need a package of measures which does three things: first, removes the barriers which are preventing foreign nationals, especially EU nationals, training here to be MFL teachers; secondly, removes the barriers preventing foreign nationals who have completed that training in the UK going on to accept job offers; and, thirdly, improves the pipeline of homegrown MFL teachers.

This is a good point to indicate that very similar problems and solutions are also relevant for maths and physics teachers, where reliance on overseas recruitment is at least as great as for modern languages. Some of my proposals are within the remit not of the DfE but of the Home Office, but there could not be a better Minister to take up those issues with her colleagues there.

Issue number one is that nearly half the UK’s trainee language teachers are foreign nationals. But anyone would think we were trying to deter them, not encourage them. Bursaries have been reduced from £26,000 to £20,000 and scholarships from £28,000 to £22,000. The bursary does not always even cover the basic costs of the training fee for international students, which varies enormously between providers. In Cambridge this year, for example, it is nearly £40,000.

Universities often ask for half the fees in advance, but the bursary is paid in instalments, which leads to many students taking on debt in order to train. A recent report from the Institute of Physics revealed that some trainee physics teachers were resorting to sleeping in libraries and using food banks. The international relocation payment of £10,000 was scrapped in April 2024. So I ask the Minister whether she will restore the level of bursaries and scholarships and reinstate the relocation payment.

Once students are qualified, another set of obstacles appears. Instead of achieving a strategically sensible return on investment, we now make it as difficult as possible for the teachers we have trained to teach in a UK classroom. The problem now is visas and immigration rules. Overseas teachers must apply and pay for a skilled worker visa, together with the NHS surcharge. The school offering the job must also sponsor the visa, which comes at another cost.

The APPG has heard a great deal of evidence from schools reporting that they cannot or will not do that, because they do not have the funds or admin staff to deal with it. This is a critical problem. Despite the existence of DfE guidance, many schools say that the process of applying for the sponsor visa is unbelievably complicated and costly and, since the graduate visa route was reduced in duration to 18 months, it is no longer a viable route for early career teachers, whose induction period is two years. The official guidance is clearly not cutting through and must be made clearer, more effective and more upfront, because our data suggest that up to half of international trainees fail to secure employment after qualifying.

I have questions for the Minister on this aspect of the supply chain. Will she back a visa waiver for qualified MFL teachers recruited to teach in state schools and actively encourage the Home Office to introduce it? If it needs to be piloted first, will her department and/or Home Office colleagues provide rapid, streamlined guidance to schools on how to apply for the sponsor visa and reduce or relieve altogether the costs of doing so? Will she restore the graduate visa to 24 months so that it aligns with the induction period for early career teachers? These are all relatively low-cost, swiftly implementable measures whose impact could be easily and quickly evaluated. We are going to continue relying on overseas recruitment of MFL teachers until or unless we can produce more of our own. The immigration White Paper from last May sets out an expectation that employers will prioritise the so-called domestic workforce but, for MFL teachers, no adequate domestic workforce exists, because we produce so few graduate linguists. So a special case for a visa waiver must be made.

I turn finally to what can be done to improve the sustainability of languages in our schools and universities, to cut through the vicious circle I described earlier. Two immediate critical interventions could make an effective start. The first would be an advanced modern languages premium for secondary schools and colleges, modelled on the successful advanced maths premium introduced in 2017, the purpose of which would be to boost A-level take-up. The British Academy calculated in 2021 that achieving a 20% increase in the take-up of modern languages at A-level would cost around £3 million a year. The policy is widely supported across the sector. So, while the DfE is giving more thought to flexible languages pathways and GCSEs in response to the recent curriculum and assessment review, will the Minister at least commit to an advanced languages premium to boost A-levels as an immediate and hopefully even temporary measure? In combination with a visa waiver, this could be a quick win to help spark the chain reaction and step change we need.

More A-level take-up would lead to more applications to study languages at university, where language degrees are in crisis: in many cases, in terminal decline or already dead. They survive in only 10 post-1992 universities, and provision in the Russell group has already begun to crack with the recently announced plans from Nottingham. Cold spots reveal distinct inequality of provision towards students from less privileged backgrounds, which of course is compounded later by worse employability after graduation. Cuts in languages at HE level have a serious knock-on effect in economic, diplomatic and research competitiveness, as well as the teacher supply chain. Closures of courses in Mandarin, Russian and Arabic are a particular threat to the UK’s pipeline of specialist linguists needed for defence and security roles.

However, resuscitation is possible, as well as urgent. My key recommendation for an immediate measure to stem the tide of cuts and closures is for university modern language degrees to receive category C1 strategic funding from the Office for Students. Currently, as I understand it, its allocations focus mainly on STEM subjects, on the grounds that they are of strategic importance and cost more to provide. Archaeology also attracts this level of additional strategic funding. The same can, and must, be said of language degrees, which are more teaching intensive compared to other humanities subjects, requiring more contact hours, smaller classes, provision of new languages taught from scratch and, of course, the sustainability of the third year abroad, which is often described as “the jewel in the crown” of a languages degree and is very highly valued by prospective employers. Languages’ strategic importance to critical industries and functions of the state should be much better acknowledged by this additional funding. Does the Minister agree, and will she exert as much pressure and influence as she can on the OfS to take this on?

I have intentionally focused on a small number of measures which could be taken in the immediate and short term. My proposals also show that getting language teaching right is not just a challenge for the DfE but cuts across many government departments and agencies. The decline is currently very acute, but language skills are vital to so many aspects of the UK’s cultural, economic, soft-power and security interests that we really must not allow things to get past the point of no return. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Coussins (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister very much for her reply. I am pleased and happy to hear her say that she recognises that schools still have an issue over how complicated and costly the process for applying and getting sponsorship visas can be. I hope very much that that will lead to more efficient and upfront guidance and help for schools on this issue.

On some of the other issues and questions that I put to the Minister in my introduction and which have been raised by other noble Lords, I think there is still some distance between what the Minister has set out as positive progress and the evidence being received by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Languages from teachers and schools, particularly teachers who are foreign nationals who have been trained here as MFL teachers but still find it very difficult to get jobs here because of the difficulty in negotiating the visa requirements. I hope that the Minister will be open to follow-up discussions with me and other noble Lords to see whether we can push a little further with the department, and of course the Home Office, on these issues.

In thanking all noble Lords who have participated in this debate, and at the risk of breaching one of the rules in the Companion, I would just like to say, merci, danke, gracias and shukran.

Motion agreed.