Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many qualified teachers of Romanian there are in schools in Harrow; and if she will make a statement.

Information on the school workforce in England, including subjects taught in state funded secondary schools, is collected as part of the annual School Workforce Census each November. Information is published in the ‘School Workforce in England’ statistical publication which is available at: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england.

Information on the number of qualified teachers of Romanian is not collected by the Department. Any teachers of Romanian will be reported by schools to the Department within the ‘Other modern foreign languages’ category.

It is up to individual schools to decide which languages are taught as part of their curriculum, both at primary and secondary school, and the Department does not specify which languages should be taught or how to teach them. When deciding which languages to teach their pupils, schools are likely to consider the needs of the community in which they serve. Schools would be able to teach pupils Romanian as a language option, if they thought there was sufficient demand to do so.

In March 2023, the Department launched its new Language Hubs programme, managed by the National Consortium for Languages Education (NCLE) based at University College London’s Institute of Education. As part of this programme, the NCLE is expected to increase access to home, heritage, and community languages, signposting to supporting materials and good practice, and working more closely with supplementary schools.