Lesser-taught languages

Richard Bacon Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

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

When the Prime Minister appointed me as his envoy to the central and eastern European diaspora in the United Kingdom, I was obviously very pleased. I am the first British Member of Parliament ever to have been born in Poland. As I said earlier, when I go to Warsaw and speak to representatives of non-governmental organisations, of commercial operations and of the Government, the conversation is completely different when I speak in Polish. People open up and tell me things that they would not normally tell me, and I am able to engage with them in a completely different way.

As a result, I have now asked a lady in Shrewsbury to help me to improve my Polish, and she comes every Saturday to teach me and my daughter, Alexis. Alexis is eight years old, and she is much better at learning the language than I am, as children often are. Alexis had come to me and said, “Daddy, I’m half Polish and I want to learn the language.” That made my heart melt; I was so proud of her. I very much hope that she will do Polish A-level one day, and that she will be able to speak the language fluently. I know that, whatever walk of life she follows—perhaps she will have a business career—knowing a second language will give her a huge advantage. If we are going to remain in the European Union, it is vital that we engage with our political counterparts in their own language.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois). He and I share a passion for British exports; we both come from an exports background. I spent 14 years exporting British goods around the world before I became a Member of Parliament. If we look at the world map, we see that we are exporting most to English-speaking countries but that, surprisingly, there is a huge dearth—a void—of British commercial interests in many parts of the world simply because we do not understand the language. The Prime Minister has set a target of £1 trillion of exports by 2020, which some say is unachievable. I believe it can be achieved, but we have to help the small and medium-sized enterprises, to which my hon. Friend the Member referred. One in five SMEs is exporting and if we can get that to one in four, we will completely wipe out our trade balance deficit. We are not going to get back to substantial economic prosperity in this country unless our SMEs are exporting to countries to which hitherto we have not exported. These languages are of huge importance in that, so I implore the Minister to take that into account. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North and I am very grateful for what he has done. I very much look forward to hearing from the Minister about the interventions he is going to make to ensure that these vital language courses stay.

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

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

May I just ask you, Mr Bacon, to allow enough time for the Minister to reply? This debate will end at 7.30 pm.

[Mr Bacon]

I have an eager eye on the clock and I will abide by what you have said, Madam Deputy Speaker. I wish to make a brief contribution.

Some 10 days ago—two weeks ago—in my capacity as co-chair of the all-party group on Iran, I helped host five Members of the Iranian Parliament here in Westminster for most of a week. When we were not in Westminster, one of the most interesting trips we did was to Cambridge, where we met the professor of Persian studies, some young British students who were studying Persian, some young members of the diaspora and some people who had come here from Iran to study at masters and at PhD level. On the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) made, when we look at the statistics on this country’s exports to Iran, we find that, sadly, for a variety of reasons we are all too familiar with, they have been going down. Interestingly, that has been while United States’ exports in areas where the US has a competitive advantage, such as agriculture and pharmaceuticals, have been increasing substantially.

There will come a time when our relations with Iran, including our commercial relations, are able to flourish and prosper in the way that many of us would like to see. When that time comes, we have to be ready. We need to be preparing for that now. We need to make it more normal to learn “lesser-taught languages” as they are termed in this debate. The best part of that description is “taught”, because they are not lesser in any other sense. I am looking at my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Sir John Randall) and I recall a friend of mine who is now at The Economist teaching me a phrase in Serbo-Croat many years ago which turned out to mean, “Why don’t you speak Serbo-Croat?” I have yet to find a useful use for it.

The truth of the matter, however, is that the single most human part of the encounter during the Iranians’ visit was when I recited a poem in Farsi that I had taken the trouble to learn. That opened a whole set of windows that had hitherto been closed in the way we dealt with each other. The Iranians went home, reporting back that they had had a very successful visit. I only hope we can do more business in the future and improve the relations between our countries, but the ability to communicate with each other is of the essence.

Let me make one point about the comments made by the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz). At one point in his speech he used the phrase “examination authorities”. We all know what he means by that, but these people are not authorities; they are contractors. They have been given the chance by the state to offer qualifications, or they have qualifications that are widely recognised as if they have the force of the backing of the state, but the state does not have to leave it there. We are in an environment where we have been hearing the phrase “more for less” from many different domains for several years, and that is what we ought to expect of the examination authorities. Instead of saying, “We don’t have enough people to offer a Polish qualification, an Iranian qualification, a Serbo-Croat qualification or a Portuguese qualification”, we should be saying, “These are the economies of the future, which are growing and with which we will be trading. Let’s find a way to make sure, by the use of imagination and wit, that we can do more for less. Either you come with us on this journey, provide more for less and show that you can do it, or we will find someone else who can.”

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr Nick Gibb)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) on securing this debate, and pay tribute to him for his support of the study of foreign languages and for the way in which he consistently and energetically fights for the interests of his constituents in Enfield North.

Learning a foreign language is both a great pleasure and an excellent preparation for life in a modern country such as Britain, which has an outward looking and globalised economy. I also pay tribute to the all-party group on modern languages for the work it does in highlighting the importance of studying a modern foreign language in our modern economy. I also welcome the literally unique contributions from my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Sir John Randall)—the only Member with a degree in Serbo-Croat—and my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski), the only Member who was born in Poland. My hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr Bacon) also made a powerful short speech.

My hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North is right to highlight the importance of languages for future economic growth. A report by the CBI published in 2014 found that 65% of businesses say they value foreign language skills, most importantly for building relations with overseas customers and overseas suppliers.

The Government’s programme of education reform has been the most far-reaching for a generation. We have restored rigour by introducing a new knowledge-based curriculum, which draws from the curriculums of the highest-performing jurisdictions around the world. We have raised the bar by reforming GCSEs and A-levels so that young people study genuinely demanding content, which provides a solid basis for further study and employment. Raising the status of foreign languages—both to increase take-up and improve attainment—has been central to this programme of reform.

In 2010, the study of foreign languages in English schools was in a precarious state. The removal of languages from the key stage 4 national curriculum in 2004 by the previous Labour Government led to a 36 percentage point decline in the number of pupils studying a modern foreign language at GCSE. In 2000, 79% of pupils studied a foreign language at GCSE. By 2010, that had fallen to 43%.

This Government have taken decisive action to address that decline. We agreed with the APPG on modern languages when, in its manifesto for languages, it talked about the need for a national recovery programme. We listened to the evidence on the importance of starting to learn a language early. Following the introduction of the new national curriculum in September last year, it is now compulsory for maintained primary schools to teach a language to all pupils between the ages of seven and 11. The new curriculum is also more demanding, with higher expectations for pupils’ speaking, writing, translation and grammar.

We recognised that the new curriculum would present challenges for some schools. We are therefore providing £1.8 million to fund nine projects across the country to support teaching of modern foreign languages. Many schools have responded well, and are going even further than the national curriculum requires. The language trends survey for 2014-15, published last week, found that 49% of primary schools are already teaching a language to five to seven-year-olds, even though it is not required by statute.

The new English baccalaureate performance measure has also been a hugely successful reform. The EBacc represents the strong academic core of subjects that all pupils should study, including a foreign language. As a result, the number of pupils in England taking at least one modern foreign language at GCSE has increased by 20% since 2010, and 29% since 2012.

We are also reforming GCSEs and A-levels so that they are more demanding and provide students with necessary knowledge for further study and employment. In 2014, we published reformed subject content requirements for GCSE, AS and A-level qualifications in modern foreign languages. The new GCSE will be more demanding, and most exam questions in modern languages will be asked in the target foreign language.

At A-level, the content has been strengthened, with new requirements for students to read foreign language literary works and develop a wide command of complex spoken and written language. In the past, some of the lesser-taught language GCSEs included no assessment of speaking or listening. Ofqual has decided that those elements, both of which are crucial to linguistic fluency, must be assessed in the reformed qualifications.

The new content for modern foreign languages specifies the knowledge expected of pupils taking the qualification in terms that apply to all languages. It is then for awarding organisations—the exam boards—to determine which languages to offer at GCSE, AS and A-level. We have made it clear to the exam boards that we want a broad range of subjects available to study. French, German and Spanish will always be important, and they do attract significant numbers of candidates: there are 150,000 entries for French GCSE, 57,000 for German and 71,000 for Spanish. Those subjects were therefore the first to be reformed and the new GCSEs will be in place for first teaching in September 2016, but I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North that young people should have the opportunity to study other, less familiar languages if we are to compete in the global economy.

British firms will increasingly demand staff who are fluent in languages such as Mandarin, Arabic, Polish and Turkish as they seek new markets and opportunities. We have therefore allowed the awarding organisations further time to develop new qualifications in additional languages for first teaching in 2017. They are free to develop qualifications in any language, provided that their specifications meet the subject content requirements set by the Department for Education and assessment arrangements set by Ofqual. Clearly, there is work involved in developing new GCSEs and A-levels that meet the new demands, and financial costs associated with the reform, but that should not prevent awarding organisations from offering reformed qualifications in a range of languages if they choose.

As my hon. Friend highlights, some exam boards have announced their intention to discontinue their qualifications in some languages. Those decisions appear to have been driven more by short-term commercial interests than by a robust analysis of the language skills our economy will clearly require in the future. He has raised specific concerns about AQA’s plan to discontinue Polish A-level and OCR’s plan to discontinue Turkish at both GCSE and A-level. I understand that 18,000 residents in the London Borough of Enfield speak Turkish as their first language, and my hon. Friend is right to recognise the extraordinary contribution the community makes to the local area and to London's economy. I agree with him that it is important that Turkish continues to be taught so that more young people can enjoy Turkish literature and culture, and so that British firms are well placed to make the most of Turkey's rapid economic growth. He and other hon. Friends mentioned Turkey’s growth, which I can tell them was about 26% between 2010 and 2013.

[Mr Bacon]

I am listening with great interest, but I hope my hon. Friend recognises the difference between, on the one hand, the unsurprising commercial considerations of commercial contractors making decisions in the short term, and on the other hand, the interests of this country, which are longer term. I am slightly uncomfortable with the language he is using about the choice being for the examining boards to make—that it is for them to decide what they offer. Surely it is for us as a country and as the House of Commons, and for Her Majesty’s Government, to decide what we want to do, and then to make sure that arrangements are in place—whether they are commercial or otherwise—to achieve the goals that we want to achieve?

[Mr Gibb]

There are genuine commercial factors that the awarding bodies have to take into account. We could compensate or pay awarding bodies to produce qualifications. I will deal with that point shortly.