Schools and Universities: Language Learning

Lord Willetts Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I am very impressed by these attempts to maintain order in the classroom, and I will try to stay under five minutes.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, on bringing this debate to the House, and like the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, am delighted that the Government are rejoining Erasmus+. We should, however, confront the fact that when it comes to Erasmus, the Brexiteers have a point. Erasmus was designed and assumed to be an exchange programme in which there would be roughly balancing flows of students between different countries, justifying the fact that they had taxpayer-financed education whichever country they went to. However, in reality, there were very large inflows of students into the UK through Erasmus, but, sadly, modest outflows of students, so Erasmus was a cost for the UK. Can the Minister therefore explain to the House whether the Government are doing anything in this new agreement to ensure a better balance of flows in and out of the UK? Does she agree that it is particularly important that we do more to get British students, of whatever age, studying and working in placements and internships abroad? That is the best way of solving this problem. For that, the programme needs to be properly managed. Sadly, one of the other difficulties we had with the Turing scheme was the uncertainty and failures in competent management. The sooner we can say that the British Council will have a leading role in delivering these programmes, in both directions, the greater the chance we have of something that is successful.

I declare an interest as I serve on the board of the Centre for British Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin—perhaps one of the remaining uses of my rusty A-level German. At Humboldt University, we try to send students on a combined programme of study and work placements in the UK. Since Brexit, that has been a lot harder. I very much hope that, now we are rejoining Erasmus+, that will be more feasible again. However, the students in Berlin are not simply German nationals; they come from elsewhere. Will this arrangement cover German universities regardless of where the students come from, or will the arrangement be restricted to the subset of students at the Centre for British Studies who are German or other EU citizens? It would be very helpful to hear from the Minister on that. I hope she may agree that if specific issues like this arise, I can write to her and take her through the issues and problems that we face.

I want to end on one wider point. We have heard some bold claims about the study and teaching of modern languages being fun. I hope that that is the case; it is a great argument to deploy. However, I personally find that an argument that is particularly persuasive with Ministers used to hard-headed assessments of economic benefits and returns to the UK, and who often focus very much, therefore, on STEM subjects as those with the greatest utility and practical value, is that when they or the media sit around considering a crisis anywhere in the world, we assume in the UK that we have a window on the world. We always assume that we have an expert who speaks the language, that we have a historian who knows the background to whatever crisis or political problem. We assume that our security agencies have the capacity to track what is going on—but, as we know, in order to pass security vetting, people need to have had a family history of living in the UK, which enables their security to be established. It is that window on the world that depends, ultimately, on British people studying a wide range of foreign languages. If we lose that, our capacity to engage in the world—including the most practical forms necessary for our own national security—is eroded. I hope, then, that during this debate, we develop a long list of arguments for modern languages, and that alongside the fun, alongside the culture and alongside the economic benefits, we will not forget the practical security angle as well.