Schools and Universities: Language Learning

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, it is conventional in this House to congratulate the sponsor of a debate, and I will certainly not miss that out on the present occasion because it is high time that the plight of modern language learning and training in the UK was drawn to public attention and remedied. But I will go further on this occasion by congratulating my noble friend Lady Coussins on the unrelenting work she has done through the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Languages to shine a light on what is, I suggest, an act of national self-harm.

Is there really a problem with modern language teaching and learning? Well, there is not much doubt about that. Others have already quoted figures, and others in this debate will quote figures, to demonstrate the scale of the crisis, but here are some of those produced on 16 December by the Higher Education Statistics Agency—HESA. From the academic year 2012-13 to the academic year 2023-24, the overall figures for modern languages dropped from 125,900 to 80,100; those for French from 9,700 to 3,700; and those for German and Scandinavian languages from 3,900 to 1,400. It is important to remember that where the drop in university places leads to closures, what are called “cold spots” occur at GCSE and A-level too.

Those figures should be a wake-up call to the Government and to Parliament. Other figures from the sector are equally dire, such as those for the Anglo-French programme for the exchange of teaching assistants in both directions for a year teaching in each other’s schools. It has just celebrated—if that is the right word—its 120th anniversary, which I attended. It was set up to mark the entente cordiale, but the figures are terrible. Some will question whether this really matters in a world where English has become—and I actually welcome this—the global lingua franca, although not, of course, the language of the majority of the population of the world. It is set to remain so for the rest of this century, and perhaps longer.

That is certainly a fact of life, and we are rightly proud of our language—its versatility, its flexibility, and the access it provides to much great literature. But is it in our interest to fly along on the coattails of the United States—which is what, in fact, we are doing—and to have less and less knowledge of, or access to, other great civilisations, many but not all by any means, in continental Europe? I would suggest not: not in business, not in trade, not in academic terms, not in the conduct of international relations, and not in the in-depth understanding of other societies.

If we are, over time, to remedy this situation, we need an overall multifaceted set of policies by government, by schools and by universities. Several recent Governments have aspired, and have announced their aspiration, to initiate such policies, but, frankly, they have then acted only in a half-hearted sort of way—often seriously underresourced, and often also with other government policies necessary for success contradicting university needs for visa access to fulfil their international student and other academic studies. It is surely time for a more systematic, better co-ordinated, better concerted effort. I do hope that the Minister, in replying to this debate, will commit the Government to undertaking such an effort.

Anyway, we have one element of such a programme already, which can be warmly welcomed: the decision by the UK, agreed by the EU, to rejoin the Erasmus+ programme in 2027, reversing the damage done when we intemperately pulled out of that programme after the Brexit vote, unlike plenty of other third countries which remain in the programme. However, look at the school visit programme: laid low by Brexit and Covid, it has still not recovered properly, despite the agreements reached between the Prime Minister and President Macron and the Prime Minister and Chancellor Merz to resume them on a bilateral basis. The restraints on collective visas for school visits to the UK make no sense whatever. Is there any evidence of illegal migration by that route? Perhaps the Minister can explain why it is taking so long to resume those school visit programmes.

The one thing we cannot afford to do as a nation that has for centuries thriven on international trade and investment, is to withdraw into a kind of monoglot ghetto, whose leading politicians complain about hearing nothing but foreign languages on public transport.

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

Order. Can the noble Lord wind up, please? He is already a minute over. If everyone takes an extra minute, the Minister will not have any time to sum up at the end.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

We should be looking at modern languages, with both teaching and learning as a means of promoting our soft power and influence, not as something we could perfectly well do without.