Education: Polish A-level

Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury Excerpts

Monday 18th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I am happy to give the noble Baroness that assurance. China is obviously a country of huge strategic importance to this country and education is very important in that. A great deal of activity is going on. In addition to the £10 million that we have given to boost Mandarin teaching in schools, excellent work is being done at the IOE Confucius Institute, supported ably by organisations such as HSBC and Swire.

[Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)]

My Lords, will my noble friend the Minister tell us what progress has been made on teaching foreign languages overall at A-level? In particular, to what extent are we reversing the trend in the teaching of German, which has shown the sharpest decline in recent years?

[Lord Nash]

My noble friend makes a very good point about the decline in German, but as I said, we believe that, with our expectation that 90% of pupils will take the EBacc, this will further increase the number of pupils taking GCSEs in modern languages. Certainly, the number of pupils taking languages in the EBacc has gone up by 25% over the last five years. We hope that this will have a compounding effect on A-levels.