Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many Mandarin language teachers are working in schools; and how many people are training to teach the Mandarin language.

The information requested is not collected by the Department.

Whilst we know from the annual School Workforce Census how many teachers are teaching Other Modern Foreign Languages in secondary schools, we cannot identify how many are teaching Mandarin.

Following the Chancellor’s announcement last September of a £10 million fund for Mandarin teaching in English schools, the Department is starting a Mandarin Excellence Programme in September 2016 with the aim of teaching Mandarin Chinese to a high level to at least 5,000 pupils by 2020. This programme will ensure that there is a sufficient number of teachers for these pupils.