Plurilingual and Intercultural Education Debate
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Lord Addington
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Plurilingual and Intercultural Education
Lord Addington Excerpts(2 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Barran (Con)
My understanding is that the decision to withdraw from the council’s European Centre for Modern Languages was taken over a decade ago and we have no plans to rejoin at this time. We currently fund teacher continuing professional development via the National Centre for Excellence for Language Pedagogy. To encourage recruitment for the academic year 2023-24, we have increased the language bursary to £25,000 and we are also offering a prestigious scholarship worth £27,000 for French, German and Spanish trainees.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, will the Minister give us some idea of the Government’s assessment of the cost of not having sufficient people understanding other modern languages—or are the Government happy to have our heads eternally bowed to Google Translate?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I am not aware of whether those costings have been done, but if they have, I am more than happy to share them with the House.