Education: Modern Foreign Languages

Lord Evans of Weardale Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Evans of Weardale (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, on enabling this important debate. I endorse what has been said by previous speakers about the importance of language teaching in the light of Brexit and the potential challenges to sustaining it. I particularly pick up the point made about our security and defence interests, which are definitely reliant on our ability to communicate and understand other countries. Without a language base, that becomes a very difficult proposition.

I want to draw particular attention to the international baccalaureate in this context. The IB is most familiar to many of us as a stretching curriculum and examination for sixth formers, but in fact it is very much more than that. There are IB programmes for all stages of school education, from primary right through to sixth form. I am pleased to declare an interest as a governor of a state academy that uses the IB to good effect throughout the school, using the middle years programme and the sixth-form programme, and moving towards using a primary school programme for the IB.

The UK is moving out of the EU and into a new relationship with countries in Europe and beyond. In that context, the educational philosophy and principles of the IB—a global outlook supported by strong language teaching, and the development of open-minded and inquiring thinkers who are equipped with the critical skills to succeed in the world—are more important than ever. We need that approach if we are to succeed in this new and challenging environment. The IB curriculum provides that in a way that is acceptable to children right through the ability spectrum, from the less able to the most academic.

I very much hope, therefore, that the Government will encourage more schools, including those that serve less-privileged communities, to see the importance of IB principles and take the opportunity to promote them through adopting IB programmes. The school where I am a governor started as a school in serious difficulty. It rebooted itself, including by adopting the IB principles and has now moved to having an outstanding status. Part of the reason for that, I think, is the aspiration and the vision that the IB gives of being part of a global community of learning. That outward-looking approach is something that many of our schools would benefit from in the current climate.