Education: Modern Foreign Languages

Baroness Janke Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Grand Committee

[Baroness Janke (LD)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to be able to join in this debate on the teaching of modern foreign languages. I too have been a language teacher, not just of foreign languages but of English. Having heard others speak, I can certainly support the fact that in trade and in doing work with people in other countries, it is essential to have a foreign language. As somebody said to me the other day, you can buy in English but you cannot sell in English, so I hope that we will take this forward.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, has already said, provision has dramatically reduced in schools, universities and higher education. I heard what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, and I agree that it is particularly concerning that so many children in schools were discouraged from taking foreign languages and that those schools were in some of the most deprived areas of the country. It seems to be a huge injustice that, as we have just heard from the noble Lord, the values of learning a foreign language have been denied to many children not only because they were not encouraged but because they were discouraged from taking a foreign language as part of the drive to raise standards.

In addition to what has been said already, I support compulsory language learning in primary schools. However, if we are to have a national language recovery programme, we will have to move very quickly, increasing capacity within schools and universities, increasing the number of teachers and changing the culture that somehow we in this nation do not really need to speak foreign languages. As someone who has taught adults, I would also say that we need to incentivise people in work. I think that employers are very keen to have their employees speak foreign languages—more so in view of Brexit. Something like £45 billion is lost to GDP through the lack of language learning skills.

When I taught English as a foreign language in France, there were many incentives to learn a foreign language. Employees were given the time to do so by their employers, they were given help with payments, and the Government backed a national scheme. That was some time ago—lots of people in France now speak English. However, people took that up, and it is a fallacy to say that people in adult life cannot learn languages. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, talked about methodologies in schools, but there are now many ways of learning languages. I know many adults who have learned foreign languages online, doing it in their spare time. That is particularly attractive to young people, who I understand are more and more motivated to learn foreign languages because they do not believe that they were very well taught in school.

Therefore, I would definitely back a national language recovery scheme. I very much hope that the Minister can give us some encouragement on that but, from my point of view, I would add: do not let us just leave it to schools and teachers; let us get the adults learning as well.