Schools and Universities: Language Learning

Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, on initiating this debate. I would like to focus on the second part of the Motion, on the sustainability of language learning in schools and universities.

We have to start with the question of why you should learn a foreign language. If the desire to learn a foreign language is diminishing, that is problematic. Most of us, with few exceptions in this Chamber, will have grown up at a time when it was obvious why you would want to learn a foreign language. If you wanted to go anywhere, English was spoken in some parts but, however hard you worked and however loud or slowly you spoke, it still was not understood, so you had to do something about it. We then had huge movements of people and lots of people’s parental language was not the language of the country they grew up in.

But all that has changed. There is diminishing strength and movement in the reason why you should learn a foreign language, particularly if you are an English-speaking monoglot. The fact is that polyglots are in the majority in the world; it is just the English speakers who get stuck with their single language. Globally, there are far more non-native English speakers than native ones.

Allow me to just acknowledge the practical purposes of learning a foreign language. The noble Baroness, Lady Cousins, reminded us only in the past 12 months, when we talked about the Criminal Justice Board, about the need for court translators and interpreters, who are incredibly important in the ability to deliver justice. There are other areas, but I want to briefly move away from the utility argument, although I do so with real hesitation because the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Chartres, will be speaking after me and, if I get this theologically wrong, I ask him to please correct me.

It is 500 years since William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament. By bringing together Hebrew and Greek terms, he coined the word “atonement”, which was fundamental to the Reformation. Its root is “at-one-ment”. Such concepts and ideas have enormous impacts in history, and understanding language and its power, and the acquisition of a foreign language or another language from your native one—which in reverse allows you to understand your own language better—is such a fundamental part of the human condition.

Having looked 500 years back, I would like to look 100 years ahead, when I think English will be dominant as the lingua franca. If you work for a large multinational company in mainland Europe and you have a business meeting, it requires only one person on that call to not have the native language of the country in which you are based for the meeting to be held in English, even though there may be people around the table who would be much more comfortable in another language.

This is one of the very few occasions when I would like to come back in 100 years and hear what that majority English globally will sound like. We might find that the English as spoken in the British Isles would be classified as some strange form of a modern foreign language. That is why I think that ownership of that language is enormously important.

The key thing that I urge on the Minister is that valuing a foreign language has to start at home. I declare my interest as First Civil Service Commissioner. Why does not even the diplomatic service recruit on the basis of language skills? Why is it that we recruit fast streamers with language skills—probably because of family background—and do not recognise that?

On a final point, we have huge populations in which the main language spoken, as you can see from the 2001 census, is Urdu, Gujarati or Hindi. For families that are multilingual, as in Birmingham where I was an MP, or in cities like Leicester, if you have a certificate our system does not actually recognise that second language as a qualification. Within our institutions, we need to value language and its utility much more, as well as looking—when it is based on populations, need and workplace—to be just that bit more imaginative. Just thinking that we need more foreign language teachers, and saying that is great because it allows us to buy a cup of coffee everywhere, is not sufficient.