Education: Languages

Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, for bringing this debate. As the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, said, she is a doughty champion for modern foreign languages. I wish her well in her campaign. As the noble Baroness said when she introduced this debate, the rot really set in in 2004, when we reluctantly as a House agreed to allow the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, to drop the requirement from the national curriculum for a modern foreign language to be compulsory in key stage 4. That deal with the noble Baroness was in return for languages being made compulsory in primary schools. The rolling out of the primary school programme for teaching modern foreign languages was introduced at that time. I have to say that I am extremely distressed that this has now been dropped.

The agreement followed on from a report by the Nuffield Foundation. Looking at why Britain was so bad at languages, it came up with the answer that, in countries such as the Scandinavian countries and Holland, English was taught from a very early age. It was taught in primary schools. Thus, children were already somewhat fluent when they arrived at secondary school, where it was reinforced by further study. The report suggested that children learnt languages better at the ages of seven, eight and nine than they did later and that, therefore, it would be a good idea to teach languages in primary schools.

The other idea was that languages should be taught like music. If you were good at languages you could attain grade 8; if you were less good you could do grades 1, 2 or 3, or something like that, and stop at that point. That notion—the Language Ladder was referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins—has translated the teaching of modern foreign languages into precisely the music grade system, which is to be welcomed. It provides a good foundation from which young children learning languages at primary school can develop their language skills. It is doubly unfortunate that we now propose to drop the programme of teaching languages in primary schools.

I certainly remember having tea with the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, and talking to her at some length about the idea that, while we did not have people trained in modern foreign languages with degrees to teach them in the schools, we nevertheless had a great many native speakers. If we presume to send people abroad to teach English as a foreign language after six weeks’ intensive training, there is no reason why many native speakers in this country could not be trained as teaching assistants to teach, particularly in our primary schools, to the level required.

One of the unfortunate things about the primary school programme is that, while teaching modern languages was great fun, it was often for little more than half an hour a week because of the requirements of the national curriculum and the lack of time in those schools. It requires not half an hour a week but half an hour every day with a language assistant, which helps someone to become fluent.

I entirely agree with the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper. Learning a language helps you to understand your own and to use your own language. It is a very important skill. I am very sorry to see it being dropped and I hope that my noble friend the Minister will assure us that the Government will give it high priority and that we shall be reinforcing these programmes.