Lesser-taught languages

Nick de Bois Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

I wish to express my disappointment at the fact that a number of exam bodies have decided to pull out of teaching GCSE and A-level for lesser-taught modern languages. It seems that from 2016 or 2017 we will lose a large number of what are referred to as lesser-known languages, and for teaching purposes as modern languages. Those include Arabic, modern Greek, Japanese, Urdu, Bengali, modern Hebrew, Punjabi, Polish, Dutch, Persian, Gujarati and Turkish. In short, my case is that a short-term decision by exam bodies, supposedly made on the grounds of low uptake and/or financial viability, will put at risk the UK’s future trade, diplomatic and cultural relationships with many future economic success stories.

The internationally recognised group known as the Next-11 countries—the House will be grateful that I will not list them all—have been identified as countries set to enjoy rapid and sizable growth. However, with these cuts to exam board qualifications we are set to dismiss, among others, Arabic, Bengali, Turkish and Persian. Indeed, for Britain there will not be the Next-11 countries, but there may be the Next-7. The British Council identified key languages based on economic, cultural and educational factors. Those included Arabic, Turkish, Portuguese and Japanese, yet they too have been identified as of no further interest to exam bodies.

I fear that unfortunately we are not learning the lessons of the past. We have all become familiar with the success of the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China—which were identified decades ago as the growth economies of the future. Yet to all intents and purposes, for some years we in the UK have fared less well than some of our competitor neighbouring EU countries in doing business with the BRIC countries, and I suggest that in part that was because we did not teach and master the languages of the economies that we knew were about to emerge—and emerge they did. Are we now set to repeat those mistakes with the Next-11 countries and the so-called MIST countries—those countries have taken over from the BRICs and are Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey?

Let me use the example of Turkey for illustrative purposes. Turkish is currently taught at GCSE and A-level, but the OCR board’s proposed policy is to cease to teach it as a modern language. The OCR—a not-for-profit organisation—has cited commercial viability as the reason for not proceeding with that exam, arguing that only 1,700 GCSE students and 600 A-level students entered for it. The decision to drop the GCSE and the A-level baffles me, frankly, not least because the number of candidates achieving A-level grades A to E is higher than that for courses the exam bodies are keeping, namely German and Spanish. The decision by the OCR is further complicated—and difficult to understand and challenge—by the fact that on the grounds of commercial sensitivity it will not share the financial information it claims is driving this decision. If it is abandoning the course, I struggle, as one who spent 25 years in business, to understand what could be commercially sensitive.

Perhaps I can make a note of my first two points for the Minister. Will he confirm that the Government are not putting financial pressure on exam bodies, or, indeed, if they are putting pressure on exam bodies? Will he require them to share the financial rationale for that decision with him or his officials?

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a very important case. May I just tell him about the Shpresa project, which works in my area among families who came to the UK from Kosovo? Teaching people Albanian is a very important part of what it does. The young people are very keen that there should be a GCSE, as there is not one at the moment. The exam body has told them that raising £100,000 would enable a GCSE to be introduced. So far, they have raised £80,000.

[Nick de Bois]

I pay tribute to them for their ingenuity and their willingness to try to solve their problem. That points to something I would like to say about the diaspora a little later, but I applaud their entrepreneurial and, shall we say, Conservative instincts to try to find a solution for themselves.

I am quite happy to respect the commercial sensitivity argument about not putting information in the public domain. However, as the Minister will see later, I am anxious that if he were to explore that argument with the OCR it would perhaps either provide comfort or expose as flawed the argument that has been put forward.

On the wider argument, does the Minister agree that the case for learning modern languages is very simple? The world is becoming even smaller. We are seeking to deliver on the Government’s pledge and target to build exports across the globe and to maintain strong trading arrangements with the EU. We will therefore need fluent, well-educated people to build our relationships with Turkey, Poland, Iran, Bangladesh and the other countries I have mentioned. We will need language skills to do business with many of those countries.

[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the exam boards have for a long time cross-subsidised the smaller subject areas? The key thing here is to increase the numbers of people taking the exams. We know very well that it is a huge step forward to go from speaking a language at home to working towards a qualification. We should be aiming to offer more children the opportunity to get a qualification that then makes them able to do the things he describes in the commercial world: to operate as adults, not simply as children who have a language at home.

[Nick de Bois]

The hon. Lady makes an excellent point. Her work on the all-party group on modern languages champions the arguments for why we should engage with diasporas and capitalise on their contribution and their links, through the second and third generations, as well as making the teaching of these languages widely available. We could then turn around the reputation of Britain as a country that is not necessarily interested in other languages to one that champions such skills, so that we can return to and explore our roots as a trading nation. She makes the point about the advantages of the diaspora very well.

After five years in this place, I recognise that sometimes people are cynical about taking the word of an MP, so, shocking as that might be, I shall turn to some evidence that I hope the exam bodies will take on board. In 2013, the British Chambers of Commerce surveyed 4,768 companies, of which 70% responded that their access to greater exports was diminished by a lack of language skills. It is obvious, but it is good to have the evidence. UK Trade & Investment’s 2013 report, “The Costs to the UK of Language Deficiencies as a Barrier to UK Engagement in Exporting”, showed a staggering loss to British business of £48 billion in exports through poor language skills. I do not need a long education in mathematics to work out that this would be an astonishing return on our investment, if we could capture that £48 billion by continuing our investment in modern languages, including many of the lesser modern languages.

In case we need more convincing, I refer the House to the latest report from Professor James Foreman-Peck, of Cardiff business school, which, in 2015, showed convincingly that small and medium-sized enterprise exporters with strong language skills achieved far higher export-to-turnover ratios. That is the holy grail if we are to continue to drive our export business. It is simple. We require exam bodies to invest in the future by keeping and growing modern language courses, not cutting them back. On the point I think the hon. Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) was making, should we not be responding to the alleged concern about entry numbers for GCSE and A-levels, as in the case of Turkish, modern Greek, Polish and Bengali, with an attempt to reach more students by marketing the unique benefits of these courses? There is a vast audience out there waiting to take up the challenge.

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate, the title of which is “Lesser-taught Languages”. In Leicester, these languages are not lesser taught—Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali and Arabic qualifications are sat by hundreds of students every year. He has hit the nail on the head. If we want to expand trade, rather than getting rid of these qualifications, we should be encouraging schools to offer them, in addition to the madrassahs, temples and community organisations that currently offer them in Leicester.

[Nick de Bois]

Indeed. With the best of efforts, many of these supplementary educational skills—the hon. Gentleman rightly talks highly of those in his constituency—are not going to deliver the modern language skills we need at A-level and GCSE level to take pupils on to other qualifications. They are complementary. I will talk shortly about what is being done in the community, but on his point about “lesser-taught languages”, it was the term I inherited and felt worthy enough to draw to the attention of the Speaker’s Office. However, he makes very well the point that many people on Twitter have made to me. We still think of them as lesser languages, but in fact they are the languages of the future, economically, culturally and diplomatically.

[Mr Richard Bacon (South Norfolk) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. I have been to Turkey several times in recent years and have been impressed by the scale—7% or 8%—of its economic growth. There is a construction site almost everywhere. I am shocked to hear that an exam board might be thinking of withdrawing a Turkish GCSE qualification. Given that the state could provide these qualifications itself but chooses to allow exam boards to do it, is not the answer for the state to say to exam boards, “If you wish to be an exam board, we will hold you to a higher standard”?

[Nick de Bois]

My hon. Friend rightly makes a suggestion that I will be reinforcing to the Minister a little later. He is right. The Government’s job, and our job, is to lead. I know from questions I have tabled to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Education that they would rightly echo the sentiments he has expressed and which I am sure others in the Chamber hold regarding the value and importance of these qualifications. With a new Parliament, perhaps we can put some oomph—that will be an interesting one for Hansard—into backing up what we aspire to deliver.

As is evident today, there are cross-party calls, led by the all-party group on modern languages, for the political commitment to which my hon. Friend has referred. I think it is also a political commitment to transforming the reputation of the UK as essentially poor linguists. I was blessed in that my father was in the Royal Air Force, so I lived and travelled in many locations overseas. I found it quite hard to learn a modern language overseas. For many years we were in Holland, and as the Dutch told me, “We are all learning English because no one is really keen to learn Dutch.” I am not sure that that is necessarily the case now, but because we were English, we were inherently gifted by the fact that so many people wanted to learn English. That is not the way of the world now—in an ever-changing world and an ever-changing global market. I do not want Britain to be seen as a country that is reluctant to value languages other than English.

The all-party parliamentary group rightly set out other important aims—for example, to ensure that every child achieves a high-quality language qualification by the end of their secondary education. Indeed, that is an ambition that other countries do not need themselves, as many of them are on the way to achieving it. I think it right for exam boards to seek to review their policy, which is in my opinion short-termist and taken in isolation of the needs of business and in isolation of the wider UK skills level training for the future.

As the APPG rightly recognises, the commitment to, and the status of, modern languages are strategically important, yet this move, along with the wider concerns about the take-up of modern languages, make our position more vulnerable now and for the future. As the UK becomes more diverse, with a growing diaspora from many different countries, we should not lose sight of the unique opportunity to build closer cultural, diplomatic and business relationships with countries of origin.

Let me explain. In Enfield North, I have a very mixed population, with strong, well-established second and third generations of Turkish-speaking communities, Greek Cypriot communities, south-east Asian and Polish communities, to name but a few. Indeed, it was interesting to find out from my research that Polish is the second most commonly spoken language in the UK. This is not a reason, in my opinion, to abandon the A-level, but a case to ensure that we encourage the second and third-generation Polish people to become the entrepreneurs, academics and diplomats for the UK and to ensure that we help Poland to do more business with the UK. That is surely the role of modern languages—to secure the qualification, to get it recognised as a qualification that is utterly distinct from what people might learn in the home and to allow people to use languages to progress and develop the careers they need. If I sound as if I know what I am talking about at all, it is down to the discussions I have had on this subject with my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski). It is also worth noting that Poland is currently the UK’s ninth largest export market. That is surely something that we should tap into more.

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

Poland is one of our largest and fastest-growing export markets. Whenever I go to Warsaw, the discussions I have in Polish are completely different from those I have when I speak in English. They are so much more open to discussions when people make the effort to learn their language. I very much hope that we can save the Polish A-level, purely from a commercial perspective.

[Nick de Bois]

I well take my hon. Friend’s point. I am blessed with a French name, but from the presumption that I speak French I recognise the constant disappointment of French-speaking people when I am limited to saying, “I am sorry, but I do not speak very good French”—in French, at least! My hon. Friend is right that the whole tone, mood and understanding can change when we nuance business relationships by using the language of the people we hope to do good business with.

What I said about Poland, I have already said about Turkey, and it is true of Bangladesh—a growing economy in the world, with unique and historic ties. It is set to be a growing economic partner to the UK, but that could be threatened by the decision to close the door on opportunity by not teaching Bengali, which is the 10th most spoken language in the world. That is a pretty big door of opportunity to close. I think that, in the mid to long term, these very same people can be at the forefront of the strengthening of links with their relatives of generations ago, back at home. I think that that can be part of a wider picture, and that what is becoming an increasingly smaller world can be a world in which we send our ambassadors from the United Kingdom, whose origins lie in the diaspora, to be our No. 1 representatives abroad.

Let me, at this point, pay tribute to Londra Gazete, a north London Turkish newspaper that has championed this issue—so much so that, in less than a week, more than 1,500 people had signed up to argue the case for it. It is not as if people are doing nothing now. The diasporas are certainly not sitting around doing nothing; they have their supplementary schools, and they follow the true Conservative principles of personal and family responsibility. Many people from different communities have set up such schools to help second and third-generation people who were born and raised in Britain to rediscover their language of origin. That is what is happening in the Turkish supplementary schools in Enfield. By keeping Turkish as a modern language, we formalise the achievement of pupils in those schools. It is a recorded academic achievement that can take them on to university, and, as I have said, they can become ambassadors and exporters for Britain.

Teaching in the supplementary schools is not a substitute for modern languages GCSE or A-level courses. I do not want our exam bodies to limit the ambition of any diaspora second or third generation. However, as I said at the beginning, this is not just about diasporas. We should not be limiting the ambitions of all Britons who are willing to learn important languages of the future. What may be a lesser modern language now will certainly not be a lesser modern language in the future.

I want to know whether the Minister will meet exam board decision makers—not least those on the OCR—as a matter of urgency, to raise this matter and convey the concerns that have been expressed in the House and in the modern languages community. I should be grateful if he threw his full weight and authority behind repeating the arguments that have been presented here tonight.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gibb]

I will come to that in a moment. First, I wanted to point out to my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North and to other hon. Members that OCR plans to continue offering an IGCSE in first language Turkish, which I hope will be of interest to many of my hon. Friend’s constituents who already speak Turkish.

[Nick de Bois]

I want to put it on record that that has been examined by many people, but it is nowhere near the standard that we require for A-level and it will not achieve the objective, for example, of helping someone get into a university with that qualification.

[Mr Gibb]

I will take that point to the awarding organisations. Although the IGCSE will not count in school performance tables, the qualification is recognised by further and higher education as a demonstration of a student’s proficiency in the language. Clearly, though, the availability of the IGCSE is not a full substitute for a GCSE in Turkish as a foreign language, for those who are learning it as a second language rather than as a first language.

I have listened to the powerful case made by my hon. Friend and other hon. Members this evening on behalf of their constituents and others who recognise the importance of languages to our economy. I should point out, for the sake of balance in this debate, that the Turkish GCSE attracted only 1,403 entries last year, and for the Turkish A-level there were only 354 entries. Indeed, the entry figures have been consistently low for a number of years.

These relatively small numbers create some genuine difficulties for awarding organisations. In addition to diseconomies of scale, they may struggle to recruit sufficient staff to mark the exam and find it more difficult to set grade boundaries, given the statistical variability which is more likely in smaller cohorts. Nevertheless, I believe that these problems may well have solutions. Exam boards manage to recruit markers for the current version of the GCSE and they manage to set grade boundaries effectively.

My hon. Friend is correct. It is not the Government who are applying pressure, financial or otherwise, to reduce the number of foreign language GCSEs; quite the contrary. Having listened carefully to the arguments made by him and others, both during the debate and outside the Chamber, I will raise his concerns and those of other hon. Members with the chief executives of the awarding organisations, including OCR and AQA, and I will invite them to reconsider their current position—I will do that tomorrow—and to subordinate what I believe to be a commercial calculation to the far more significant long-term economic and cultural considerations for this country. In doing so, I will also question them closely about the financial rationale for their decisions.

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend and others for raising this important issue, and I pay tribute to his firm support for the key place of languages in our long-term plan for education and the economy.

Question put and agreed to.