Schools: Foreign Languages Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Reid of Cardowan
Main Page: Lord Reid of Cardowan (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Reid of Cardowan's debates with the Department for Education
(9 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberThe noble Baroness makes an extremely good point. We have given the British Council, for instance, £500,000 to recruit foreign language assistants to work in the UK. Currently, some 1,250 foreign language assistants have been recruited for English schools, and the British Council is working with Hanban to introduce a number of Chinese language assistants into the country.
Given the multicultural identity and diversity of ethnic backgrounds of people in the United Kingdom at present, there must be hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of people, including, I suspect, hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, who are bilingual. What thought have the Government given to, or what action have they taken on, mobilising this resource by focusing either on recruitment or on some form of potentially creative, if informal, educational process to make sure that we use the resources that our multicultural society has given us?