National Curriculum

Baroness Coussins Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Coussins]

My Lords, I will focus on modern foreign languages and declare an interest as chair of the all-party group on modern languages. The reasons why learning a language is important are clearly not controversial, judging by the Education Secretary’s recent comments. It improves oracy and literacy in English and has all-round cognitive benefits. As Mr Gove put it:

“It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning”.

Learning other languages enriches cultural knowledge and understanding; benefits the UK economy and enhances employability.

There will, however, be unintended consequences of the new language curriculum for the system of adequate secondary school accountability unless certain issues are resolved upfront. The Government are quite right to commit to statutory languages at key stage 2. The Language Trends survey, published only last week, shows that 97% of primary schools are doing this already, but this figure masks some critical problems and disparities which could make the policy backfire. Nearly a quarter of primary schools have no staff with foreign language competence beyond GCSE and some are even worse off. Will the Minister tell us what investment the Government will make in the support, training, guidance and recruitment of suitable teachers so that all 18,000 primary schools are properly equipped by September 2014?

The transition to secondary also requires attention. Teachers in year 7 commonly start all over again with languages, because children arrive with such different levels of achievement. This demoralises and demotivates them. Will the Government encourage schools to use either the languages ladder or the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages to help?

The Government propose a list of seven languages to choose from, but I fear that this may exacerbate the transition problem. Perhaps key stage 2 should be confined to French, except where an LEA-wide agreement exists between all primary and secondary schools to teach another language. This is the case in Hackney with Spanish and guarantees continuity and progression. In general, however, French is the only language for which there is a realistic hope of finding enough teachers and for which progression to secondary school could be planned and achieved.

This should not stop additional languages being offered at key stage 3—and not just Spanish and German. Other languages identified by the recent British Academy report as important for British international and commercial interests include Cantonese, Arabic and Turkish. Will the Minister look at reinstating the Asset Languages qualifications, withdrawn by the OCR? It is short-sighted to praise the language skills of children who speak what we call community languages, but to deny them the opportunity to turn their casual or domestic level of competence into something more academic and professionally useful.

A rather shocking piece of information was reported to the all-party group the other week by the head teacher of one of the specialist language-teaching schools. She told us that she had met primary heads who were saying openly that they planned to apply for their schools to become academies to avoid the national curriculum requirement to teach foreign languages. I would like to hear the Minister confirm that this is not only undesirable, but wholly unacceptable, and tell us what the Government will do to prevent any school becoming an academy in order to avoid offering modern languages.

Moving on to key stages 3 and 4, the Language Trends survey shows very positive teacher feedback in favour of terminal exams as proposed by the Government. However, the Government should think again about their new secondary school accountability system based on the first eight GCSEs. This would allow schools to get their points whether the pupils take languages or not. The LTS shows that the boost to take-up from the EBacc last year has been sustained, which is good, but it has not increased, despite the Government’s forecast that the EBacc would transform languages’ take-up. Will the Minister accept that, unless languages are compulsory at key stage 4, take-up will never get back to its 2004 level?

Languages are meant to be compulsory at key stage 3, but the survey revealed that one in five state schools disapplies lower-ability pupils. On top of that, a quarter of state schools have shrunk key stage 3 to two years, leaving us with large numbers of children with hardly any language learning at all. What will the Government do to reinforce compulsory languages at key stage 3? They should be spearheading a national languages recovery programme to create a coherent, statutory languages pathway from key stage 2 right through to the end of compulsory education, just as there is for maths. There are some welcome aspects of the proposed new languages curriculum, but it is not yet well enough thought through to provide or sustain the step change we need.