Education: Modern Foreign Languages

Baroness Hooper Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hooper (Con)]

My Lords, we should all be grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, for introducing the debate and giving us an opportunity to consider this issue. At a time when there has never been more need to communicate internationally and globally, I was appalled to learn that entries for GCSE modern foreign languages have almost halved and that 50 modern foreign language departments across higher education have closed in the past 15 years. The noble Baroness has given us more detailed statistics on that. It was always a problem to recruit sufficient Brits to work in the European Union institutions because of the lack of adequate language skills. For this reason, in recent years we have fallen well below our quotas in those institutions.

Now more than ever we need foreign language skills, not only for the important and wide-ranging trade negotiations that lie ahead in the post-Brexit world— because of my particular interest in Latin America, I emphasise the importance of Spanish and Portuguese in this context—but also to sustain the tourist industry on which I foresee the United Kingdom becoming more and more dependent. I hope therefore that my noble friend the Minister will be able to reassure us that his department has taken on board the checklist created by the APPG on Modern Languages, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, and of which I am a member, and that it will be pursued.

In the short time available I wish to raise two specific issues. The first is one I have raised before as a suggestion to encourage young people to acknowledge the benefit of studying foreign languages. It is not only to use them directly as teachers, interpreters and translators, but as an additional asset to other professional qualifications. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers and many other professionals can add to the value of their work if they speak another language or languages reasonably fluently. As a lawyer, I am an example of that. I believe that the Government could give a lead on this by ensuring that application forms for Civil Service jobs in all departments include a box asking which other languages the applicant can speak. This would at least enable people to realise that the ability to speak another language is a plus factor. Can the Minister indicate whether this happens across the board, or indeed in any department other than the Foreign Office?

The second issue relates to what I consider to be a hidden treasure in the United Kingdom. It is a fact that millions of British citizens living here speak, for example, Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, Farsi or Arabic as their first language. In any assessment of modern foreign language teaching, do the Government take this into account and in what ways are they building on that resource?

I would like to have pursued other aspects which were raised in the excellent briefing and in the noble Baroness’s introduction, in particular emphasising the importance of the Erasmus programme, but I feel sure that many of these issues will be raised during the debate.