Education: Modern Foreign Languages

Lord Storey Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, for initiating this debate. My mother was German. She met my father at the end of the Second World War. He was in the Royal Scots Fusiliers. My mother came from a large family with sisters and brothers who settled all over Europe. I have cousins in Switzerland, Holland and Austria. My cousins and their children all speak immaculate English. Why? Because it is compulsory at school. They start learning a language at the age of five. That spreads all the way through. We can be quite negative about the facts and figures. Let us remind ourselves of those, because they need to be reiterated quite often. GCSE entries have almost halved since 1997. Fewer than half students entered for maths take a modern foreign language. The noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, made the point that those doing sciences or professional degrees are less likely to do a modern foreign language. This has led to an inevitable 57% drop in undergraduate numbers and—this is the most frightening figure—an average of three modern foreign language departments closing each year. Over 16,000 UK students are involved in the Erasmus programme. I hope the new Universities Minister in the other place will be more enthusiastic about sustaining our participation than his predecessor, Jo Johnson.

The decline in the number of students taking A-levels has reached a dangerous level. But let us be positive. Primary schools are now teaching modern foreign languages. Teachers are, in many schools, reporting great successes. But if we are to really make that work, it has to start at the age of five. It also has to link in with secondary schools. What happens is that you get children from primary schools up to a proficient level in, say, French or Spanish. They transfer to the secondary school and the secondary school does a different subject. All that work in developing the subject does not get realised. I do not have an easy answer, but I do know that is one of the major problems. The other problem in primary schools is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, the need to have more graduate teachers who have a modern foreign language as their degree. As we have heard previously, that is becoming less and less likely, because departments are closing down. There needs to be a training programme for those teachers and also for teaching assistants. Many primary schools use teaching assistants to do conversational work with groups of children. Whatever happens in any dreadful Brexit process, it is important that for the future prosperity of the country, we get this right.