Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Jamie Stone and Nick Gibb(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)
The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)
The Government’s ambition is that 90% of pupils will study the EBacc combination of GCSEs, including a foreign language, by 2025. We offer generous financial incentives to recruit more language teachers, and we have introduced the Mandarin excellence programme and modern foreign languages—MFL—teaching hubs to increase languages take-up and to support schools to improve the quality of foreign languages teaching.
Jamie Stone
I thank the Minister for his answer. One way to stimulate learning foreign languages in our schools is by using foreign exchange students. Indeed, in my school days, a charming French lady greatly stimulated my knowledge of the language. I am not a member of the governing party in Scotland. I therefore ask whether Her Majesty’s Government will do everything they can to continue using exchange students and to build on that in future.
Leaving the EU: Student Exchanges
Debate between Jamie Stone and Nick Gibb(6 years, 12 months ago)
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Nick Gibb
I will have to write to the hon. Gentleman about that. We want to have a spread of Mandarin excellence programmes across the country, but the initial schools were chosen because they already had a track record of teaching Mandarin very well. The project is led and driven by the excellent Katharine Carruthers of the UCL Institute of Education. The pupils I met this morning were hugely impressive, very ambitious and had high expectations. They want not only to take a GCSE and an A-level in Mandarin, but to go on to HSK 4 and HSK 5, which is essentially fluency in the language. Interestingly, I asked them all what they wanted to do when they left school and none of them wanted to go on to study Mandarin at university. They wanted to be lawyers, doctors and business people, but they also wanted to be fluent in Mandarin.
Jamie Stone
The answer to my question may be, “Write a letter to John Swinney in the Scottish Government” but does the Minister have any idea what the situation is with regard to the teaching of Mandarin across the border in Scotland?
Nick Gibb
No, I am afraid that I do not. This is a devolved matter. I have spoken to John Swinney a number of times about education matters, and the Scottish Government are implementing a new curriculum for excellence.
The programme also supports the training of new Mandarin teachers to ensure that there is capacity within the system to teach Mandarin. The quality and supply of teachers of modern foreign languages are essential to pupil proficiency and progression. It is very important that pupils are taught by high-quality and inspiring teachers—like the ones I met this morning—in all the subjects, including languages. We remain committed to attracting the brightest and best graduates into the teaching profession. To support that commitment, we continue to offer generous tax-free bursaries, worth up to £26,000, and tax-free scholarships of up to £28,000 for trainees in modern foreign languages.
Figures released today show that we recruited 1,405 modern foreign language trainees to start initial teacher training courses this year, achieving 93% of our target, which was similar to our performance last year, where we achieved 94% of our target.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Jamie Stone and Nick Gibb(7 years, 2 months ago)
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Nick Gibb
We do value teachers and teaching assistants. They do a good job of phenomenally challenging work in our schools, which is why we have 1.5 million more pupils in good or outstanding schools today than we did in 2010. The hon. Gentleman is wrong about the number of teaching assistants, which has been increasing year on year. Today, there are 265,600 full-time equivalent teaching assistants in state-funded schools.
Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)
T1. If she will make a statement on her departmental responsibilities.