Schools: Foreign Languages

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Monday 26th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness makes an extremely good point. We have given the British Council, for instance, £500,000 to recruit foreign language assistants to work in the UK. Currently, some 1,250 foreign language assistants have been recruited for English schools, and the British Council is working with Hanban to introduce a number of Chinese language assistants into the country.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

Given the multicultural identity and diversity of ethnic backgrounds of people in the United Kingdom at present, there must be hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of people, including, I suspect, hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, who are bilingual. What thought have the Government given to, or what action have they taken on, mobilising this resource by focusing either on recruitment or on some form of potentially creative, if informal, educational process to make sure that we use the resources that our multicultural society has given us?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Lord makes a very good point. I have talked about what we are doing in terms of teaching assessments, but I will look at the point he has made in more detail.