Schools and Universities: Language Learning

Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Chartres, who predictably gave us a unique perspective for this debate. We are very fortunate to have so many illustrious speakers in this debate and, in particular, two first-class bookends, if I may call them that. We have the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, who I know from working with her on the APPG is a tireless and tenacious campaigner and advocate for this, and the closing bookend is the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Malvern, who is a heavyweight Minister in this House. She is a former senior Cabinet Minister and has ministerial clout. We are looking for that ministerial clout in this debate today.

We all know that the whole position and state of the teaching and learning of modern languages in this country is in crisis. We know that there is a downward spiral of fewer pupils learning them, fewer teachers coming in, fewer graduates coming out of our universities, and fewer courses and faculties at universities. As my noble friend Lady Shephard, said, it was not helped by the decision that Charles Clarke made in 2004.

The Prime Minister has said in his own words that he wants to put Britain back on the world stage and to reset our relationship with Europe. It is worth quoting briefly what the Times said on this, when it talked about the fact that a nation that speaks only English

“limits Britain’s ability to do business, understand our neighbours, broaden our views and make lasting friendships with those beyond our borders”.

That is of course true. As other speakers, such as the noble Baronesses, Lady Blower and Lady Garden, have said, there are the wider advantages of improving and helping with learning, memory, mental faculties and so on.

My noble friend Lord Willetts referred to the Treasury approach to these things and its very hard-headed approach to taking decisions. These things are difficult to measure, which is why the Treasury has enormous difficulty. The Treasury simply cannot measure common sense and it does not know how to put it into its calculations. I hope, again, that the Minister will be an advocate when she deals with other government departments.

I understand the difficulty—the Minister will understand this better than anybody—of competing subjects jostling for position in a very crowded curriculum. I have had many discussions about this with my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking, who, as we all know, is a great advocate for engineering, science and technology. Of course, in the modern world these are very important, but if you talk to employers who are recruiting young people, you find that they recognise that there are downsides, sometimes, of technology, in that many of the people they recruit are not always as good as they should be at communication and find it more difficult to express themselves clearly and succinctly. Again, that is one of the big advantages of learning a foreign language.

I come back to the Minister. There have been, in this debate, a whole range of proposals from the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, and from other speakers. I am sure the Minister has a very good speech which will tell us everything that the Government are currently doing, but I hope she will take the opportunity to commit herself to further action in a positive way. Many proposals have come forward, and I hope she will be able to give us some comfort that there is more action to be taken by the Government.