Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to support schools to recruit qualified modern languages teachers in the West Midlands.

High quality teaching is the in-school factor that has the biggest positive impact on a child’s outcomes. This is why the government’s Plan for Change is committed to recruiting an additional 6,500 new expert teachers across secondary and special schools, and our colleges, over the course of this Parliament.

The department is offering £20,000 tax-free bursaries for modern foreign language (MFL) trainees, including international as well as domestic trainees. In addition, we are continuing to offer a prestigious scholarship worth £22,000 tax-free for French, German and Spanish trainees.

Our future school teacher pipeline is growing. Although this government inherited a system with critical shortages of MFL teachers, with the department achieving only 32% of its postgraduate initial teacher training target in 2023/24, this year we have achieved 94% of the target with 1,378 new trainees beginning their postgraduate training in MFL.