Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what progress has been made in discussions with examination boards about retaining accreditation routes for lesser-taught languages at GCSE and A-level.

Government action has resulted in GCSEs and A levels in a range of community languages being continued, to ensure young people can carry on studying a diverse range of foreign languages.

This follows a Government commitment in 2015 to protect a number of language GCSEs and A levels after the exam boards announced that from 2017 they would be withdrawing several courses.

Since then the Government has worked with Ofqual and the exam boards and we have been successful in securing most of the less-taught languages at GCSE and A level for future years. In addition to Chinese, Italian and Russian, the languages now secure are Arabic, Bengali, Biblical Hebrew, Modern Greek, Gujarati, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Panjabi, Polish, Portuguese, Turkish and Urdu.