Foreign Language Learning in Severe Decline in the UK
The new GCSE results confirm what language teachers in Britain have been saying for a decade. Foreign languages are in severe decline, and French and German are falling fastest of all.
Three-quarters of students did not sit a French exam this year. Entries dropped 6 per cent from the previous year, to 177,618. German fared little better, down 4.5 per cent to 70,169. Spanish managed a slight uplift, just under 1 per cent, to 67,707, and there was greater interest in non-traditional languages. Neither was remotely enough to patch over the trend.
One policy decision, one long slide
The turning point is not in dispute. In 2004 the government made language learning optional after the age of 14. Everything since has followed from that. When a subject is hard, marked strictly, and no longer required, teenagers choosing their options do the obvious arithmetic and pick something else.
Teachers have complained for years that modern languages are graded more severely than comparable subjects, so a pupil capable of a B in French might secure an A in geography for the same effort. Whether or not the perception is exact, it drives behaviour. Schools chasing league table positions have little incentive to correct it, and some have quietly stopped trying.
"There are schools," said Onora O'Neill, president of the British Academy, "who put zero children in for modern languages."
Zero is a remarkable number. It means a state secondary school in a country of 60 million people has concluded that not one of its pupils should leave able to order a coffee in a second language.
The primary school gap
The Department for Children, Schools and Families says languages will become compulsory for seven to eleven-year-olds from 2011. That is the correct instinct, badly undermined by a supply problem. Only one in four primary schools currently offers any access to languages at all.
Making a subject compulsory does not conjure teachers. A primary teacher confident enough to lead French lessons is, in most schools, a rarity. Training thousands of them takes years and money, and the deadline arrives regardless. The predictable outcome is a compulsory subject taught badly by staff who were themselves the product of the earlier decline, and pupils who arrive in secondary school having learned that languages are boring rather than that they are difficult.
The Spanish figure deserves a second look, because it is the only line moving the right way. Spanish is perceived as easier, more useful for travel, and more obviously connected to a place teenagers might actually go. That is not a trivial observation. Pupils are not rejecting languages in the abstract; they are rejecting subjects that feel like an exam with no destination attached. French and German suffer partly because they are taught as heritage subjects rather than as living tools, and the syllabus rarely gives a fourteen-year-old a concrete reason to care. The rise in non-traditional languages points the same way. Where a language connects to a community, a family or a plausible future, students turn up.
What the decline actually costs
The economic argument is easy to make and easy to ignore, because the cost is diffuse. Businesses lose contracts they never knew they were bidding for. The British Chambers of Commerce has repeatedly found that exporters without language capability confine themselves to English-speaking markets, and the firms most likely to be shut out are small ones with no budget for an interpreter.
The individual cost is sharper. Job adverts across the European market routinely list a second language as essential. A British graduate competing for a role in Brussels or Frankfurt against a Dutch or Polish candidate who speaks three languages is not in a fair fight, and no amount of technology fixes it. A machine can translate a document. It cannot build rapport in a negotiation.
Complacency in an English-speaking world
The unspoken assumption behind the decline is that everyone else will learn English, so the effort is unnecessary. There is some truth in it, which is what makes it so corrosive. English is the working language of international science, aviation and finance, and a British teenager who never learns another language will still be understood almost anywhere.
What they will miss is everything that happens outside the room where English is spoken. The British Council has argued for years that the UK's language deficit is a strategic weakness, not merely a cultural embarrassment, and that the country needs speakers of Mandarin, Arabic and Spanish in numbers it has never produced.
Nobody thinks it is easy
Part of the problem is a mismatch between what teenagers expect and what languages demand. Fluency does not arrive in a term. Realistic estimates of how long it takes to learn a language to working competence run to hundreds of hours for a close relative of English such as French, and considerably more for Mandarin or Arabic. That is not a reason to give up. It is a reason to start at five rather than eleven, which is precisely what the primary school policy was meant to address.
Interest has not vanished. Roughly 12,000 people a month in the United States alone search for how to learn french, and 18,000 look up the hardest languages to learn. Reddit's r/languagelearning community has grown into the millions. Adults keep taking languages up, often after leaving school having been told they were no good at them.
That gap between adult enthusiasm and classroom collapse is the most damning figure in the whole set. The appetite exists. The system is simply failing to meet it, and the 2004 decision has now had more than long enough to prove its consequences.