Education: English Baccalaureate Certificate

Lord Watson of Richmond Excerpts

Monday 14th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Richmond]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak briefly in the gap. I declare two interests as vice-president of the English Speaking Union and as High Steward of Cambridge University.

I urge the Government to avoid the mistake made in 2004 when language was removed as a compulsory subject. We know the consequence of that, although I remember sitting in debates in this House when we were assured by the Front Bench that no such consequences would occur. The consequences were that the number of young people reading, for example, French fell immediately in the first year by 14%. The number reading German fell by nearly the same percentage. That damage has stayed on and the figures remain dismal when compared with what they originally were.

What is the lesson of that experience? The lesson is that the moment you remove a subject as a core subject, consequences begin to flow. It does not matter what the rhetoric is or even what the aspiration is. The truth is that people have to calculate against a set of criteria, which then makes the cutting of these subjects inevitable.

When it happened with languages, many people said to me that the world-wide use of English—I have devoted a lot of years to it as a world-wide language—was used as an excuse to cover for our poverty in other languages. We must not make this mistake in the arts because we are riding a tiger and doing very well, and this is not the moment to take away the support.