Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall
Main Page: Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall's debates with the Department for Education
(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Agnew of Oulton
My noble friend is right; I do not think he is being a fuddy-duddy at all. We have seen a degradation in grammar; I am a martinet in the department when I receive poorly written subs—I send them straight back. I commend to the House the small charity Classics for All, which is doing as my noble friend suggested—taking Latin into areas of deprivation. I have a few references to it here which might hearten him:
“What I hadn’t expected when I started teaching Latin classes here was the students’ sheer joy of learning Latin for its intrinsic beauty and the excitement of etymology! Students actually love declining and conjugating. They see a beauty in the language of ancient poets and warriors”.
Even a child, Mohammed, said:
“I just love it. It’s just fun”.
I did not have the same experience when I was learning Latin.
Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)
My Lords, does the Minister agree with me that large numbers of children in our schools came into them as non-English speakers. They have learned to speak English, are in fact bilingual or sometimes trilingual, and are generally regarded within the education system as a problem rather than as the resource they actually represent. Can he say in what way the Government are encouraging schools to recognise children who have other languages already available and to use the resource they represent creatively?
Lord Agnew of Oulton
I reassure the noble Baroness that multilingual children are not seen as a problem from my experience in the number of schools I took over—indeed, one of the last free schools I created in Norwich had over 19 languages. It brings enormous diversity and opens the minds of children from different backgrounds. I do not think it is a problem. We have just created a small pilot with Cardiff University to trial MFL undergraduate mentoring in secondary schools to see whether they can be effective in the teaching of modern foreign languages.