Schools and Universities: Language Learning

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, for securing this debate, and more importantly for her tireless leadership in this subject.

I think that I will have to be the first to confess that I have a Duolingo addiction, but I know that a charming app—however motivating—cannot replace a great teacher or the cultural cognitive fluency that real language learning develops. The point I wanted to double-click on today is that in the age of AI, this truth becomes even sharper.

AI will help us with language, but it cannot replace human linguistic capability. If anything, it makes that idea more strategically important. There is an attractive thought that, because machine translation is improving so rapidly, we can ease off—we will not need to learn languages because every single thing programmed into our iPhones, our iPads and even our ears will help us understand somebody standing in front of us. But AI does not read intent. It cannot interpret ambiguity, does not appreciate humour, cannot decode face-saving formulations or detect the veiled threats on which diplomacy often turns. In a world where a mistranslated phrase can ricochet globally in minutes, the risk is not just error; it is the amplification of misinterpretation.

The security community is already acknowledging this. The British Academy warns that declining UK language capability risks leaving us “lost for words”. The US Government Accountability Office describes foreign language skills as “increasingly key” to diplomatic, military and counterterrorism missions. Britain is not a serious country if it speaks only English. Nor are we serious about growth, as others have already said. The economic case is clear. Our SMEs, which I remind you make up 99.9% of all firms, are markedly more competitive internationally when they have language skills. Studies show that they are around 30% more successful in exporting. We need this now more than ever. If we neglect national language capacity, we limit national economic reach.

However, we have a solution working at scale which has not yet been mentioned. At the Open University, where I am chancellor, the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics is the largest provider of university-level language learning in the UK. It reaches adults at higher education cold spots: workers retraining in mid-career, carers studying at night—people who need genuinely flexible routes back into language learning. In the age of AI, this model is not just educationally valuable; it is economically strategic. With the right incentives, the lifelong learning entitlement could make language study a normal part of adult upskilling across the country.

I end with three brief questions to the Minister which I hope will reinforce what others have already asked. First, will the Government reduce the recruitment barriers facing overseas language teachers? Secondly, will they streamline sponsorship routes for corporates for international teachers? Thirdly, will they commit to a refreshed national languages strategy linked explicitly to the lifelong learning entitlement?

AI will transform how we work with languages, but it cannot replace the human ability to understand nuanced content and intent. Investing in languages is not nostalgic; it is strategic. For my part, if I have learnt one thing in researching for this debate, it is that I now urgently need to get a real-life Spanish teacher.

Think Work First: The Transition from Education to Work for Young Disabled People (Public Services Committee Report)

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to contribute to this debate on an important and extremely thoughtful report from the House of Lords Public Services Committee. I thank the committee members and their chair for this great publication.

I read it through both a personal and professional lens. After my accident nearly 30 years ago, I was lucky: I had access to resources, mental and physical support, and people in business who believed I could still contribute. Many young disabled people do not have that combination today. That is what this report challenges us to change.

The scale of the issue is sobering, as we have already heard today: the figures have barely moved in a decade. If we halve that gap, the Government estimate an economic benefit of £50 billion a year through higher tax receipts and reduced welfare spending. This is not just a social challenge—it is a national economic priority, particularly at this time of growth focus.

The committee identifies several structural problems: low expectations in schools, careers advice that is too generic, weak co-ordination between education, employment and health, and employers who want to help but do not know how. It also spotlights what works: internships, vocational profiling and integrated services. I agree wholeheartedly with all these points; the evidence base is strong. But I want to go further in three areas where we can act faster or think differently: co-design, partnership through business networks and entrepreneurship.

Too often, systems are built for young disabled people, not with them. One in four told the committee that they received no careers advice relevant to their disability. Too many described leaving education as “falling off a cliff.” That is a design failure, not a resource one. Co-design means embedding lived experience from the start: shaping programmes, testing ideas and feeding back on what works.

I want to expand the report’s framing. The committee highlights physical and learning disabilities, but we must also confront the mental health dimension. Around 60% of young disabled people experience a diagnosable mental health condition. Support too often ends when they leave school, and there is a well-documented cliff edge between CAMHS and adult services.

If you are trying to find work while managing anxiety or depression as a result of disability, you need joined-up help, not fragmented systems that treat “health” and “work” separately. Expanding individual placement and support models, which integrate mental health and employment services, is right; these programmes deliver employment rates up to 30% higher than conventional job search. I would go one step further: embed mental health co-design panels within local employment and skills partnerships so that young people help shape the services meant for them.

Sara Weller, a disabled entrepreneur and one of the very few disabled FTSE non-execs, who runs ActionAble, shows that co-design is not a “nice to have”—it is the biggest predictor of sustained success in changing services. Evaluations of co-produced programmes show 25% to 30% higher sustained-employment outcomes than standard models.

The committee is also right that local co-ordination is often missing. It calls for stronger partnerships between education, employers and local authorities. We already have a ready-made structure that could deliver this alignment—here I declare an interest as the president of the British Chambers of Commerce; its local skills improvement plans have already been touched on today. There is now one in every region, bringing together employers, FE colleges and local authorities to match training with job demand. Yet few LSIPs currently address disability inclusion, and that is a missed opportunity. Imagine if every LSIP identified inclusive employers ready to host supported internships, mapped FE colleges and linked SMEs to the Access to Work scheme. The infrastructure exists: 400,000 businesses have engaged through the chambers and more than 200 FE colleges are involved in LSIPs.

Research for the DWP shows that when local business networks engage, young disabled employment rates rise by around nine percentage points within three years. Making disability inclusion a mandatory strand in every LSIP, with measurable targets, would turn a general skills plan into a genuine inclusion plan—owned by business, informed by evidence, and aligned with “Think work first”.

The committee focuses on employment and supported internships. I fully endorse that but I want to add, perhaps unsurprisingly, entrepreneurship. For many disabled people, self-employment is not a fallback but a natural path. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, 19% of working-age disabled adults in the UK are engaged in early-stage entrepreneurial activity, compared with 11% of non-disabled adults. Disabled people are nearly twice as likely to start a business, yet the system does not even meet them half way.

Only 3% of government start-up loans go to disabled founders, fewer than one in 20 accelerator or incubator programmes have accessibility designed in, and only 5% per cent of venture capital firms report collecting any data at all on disabled young founders. The barriers are practical and structural: inaccessible workspaces, inflexible benefit rules, opaque funding routes and low representation in networks.

Yet the potential is extraordinary. The Disabled Entrepreneurs Network found that 72% of disabled founders say their experience directly informed the product or service they created. They saw the problem and they tried to fix it. You can see it in adaptive technology, accessible fashion, inclusive design and health innovation, sectors where experience drives commercial and social value. Scope’s Future Innovators pilot, for example, supported 60 disabled founders and generated £3 million in revenue and 120 jobs in just two years.

We are seeing a new wave of organisations also backing entrepreneurs in disability. CREO, launched by Founders Forum, is building a national ecosystem to support disabled and neurodiverse entrepreneurs, connecting them with investors, mentors and accessible resources. It is a brilliant example of private-sector energy being matched with societal change. CREO’s early work shows that when disabled founders have access to mainstream networks and capital, their ventures grow 30% faster. Alongside CREO, initiatives such as the Disabled Entrepreneurs Network, the Disability Rights UK’s Leadership Academy, and UnLtd are proving that targeted mentoring, modest seed funding and inclusive design can unlock extraordinary innovation.

These efforts need to be scaled and connected, joined up with national policy and local delivery—with the LSIPs perhaps—linking local business networks with inclusive investment and mentorship. Let us make entrepreneurship a formal third route in every education-to-work strategy; that means embedding enterprise education in further education across the board, supporting internship and growth hubs and prompting the British Business Bank to report annually on participation rates. We could even pilot regional inclusive innovation funds—small-scale capital pots designed with disabled entrepreneurs to test what works. That is not just an inclusion policy, it is an innovation policy. If we removed half the barriers facing disabled founders, the Federation of Small Businesses estimates that up to 250,000 new disabled-owned businesses, which would add billions to GDP and transform representation in the UK’s innovation ecosystem. This is not charity—it is economic sense.

I am patron of Day One Trauma, a charity helping people at the point when they face massive physical trauma. It works in hospitals providing invaluable support to patients and families. One of the first and most requested pieces of advice is always about work: “What will happen now that I am disabled? How will I go back to work? What future will I have?” When I became disabled, I had resources: I had networks and opportunities, which meant that I could dare to believe that I would be able to embark on one of my crazy ideas for a new business—most of them terrible. I thought “work first” because, before it was clear that I was even going to leave hospital, I knew that was what would help me to carry on. But the combination of factors that enabled that mindset for me should not be luck—it should be policy. I urge the Government to turn Think Work First from a report into reality.