Josh James would still like to become a French teacher. He’s due to graduate next year from the University of Reading with a degree in modern languages. But it feels like a risk.
“Me and my fellow classmates want to go into education, don’t get me wrong,” he told me, “but feel we would be going into a job with little job satisfaction.” Friends already in teaching tell him that students are being pushed towards the sciences and maths, and away from languages: in one school, only one pupil wanted to do GCSE Spanish, making the course impossible to run. Worse, he worries that “it’s very possible modern foreign languages [MFL] could be replaced soon with computer-assisted tools.”
The irony is that in the short term, Josh could find a job pretty easily. The British Council found six in 10 schools say it is a challenge to hire enough teachers. The government only recruited half the teachers it wanted last year. For language teachers, it reached just 34 per cent of the target. Forty per cent of current teachers who specialise in foreign languages say they’ll probably quit by 2029, and many are already expected to teach languages they’re not qualified in.
For people like me whose lives were transformed by an A-level in a foreign language, it is painful to peel back the Department for Education rhetoric about “e-baccalaureates” and discover the truth about the precipitous decline of languages in schools.
The declining numbers of language graduates from the UK have other options, often less stressful and better paid: some want to get a job abroad where they can use the language they have spent so long learning.
“Prior to Brexit and prior to the teacher supply crisis in Europe, we were able to mitigate some of those shortfalls through European teachers coming over who were not able to find positions in their own countries,” René Koglbauer of the Association for Language Learning told the education select committee last year. “This has more or less stopped.”
In desperation, the government now offers generous bursaries of £25,000 to would-be language teachers. Yet even that has failed to attract enough British graduates, so recruitment is increasingly from abroad. Jean Wood teaches trainees at Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln. “All my trainees next year, if they can jump through the visa hoops, are from Africa, South America and two from Europe. No British applicants.”
The trainers and teachers who contacted me spoke of a “vicious circle”. Fewer teachers are fully qualified to teach foreign languages, fewer pupils choose languages for GCSE since they became optional in 2004, even fewer pick them for A-level, university language courses close, and the cycle repeats itself. The BA courses that do remain are the ones that demand higher A-level grades, making languages the preserve of an elite.
For German, which is far more likely to be taught in private schools — when it is available at all — the situation is especially grim. Just 2,358 people sat A-level last year, half the number in 2011. Its “elite” reputation persists, even though Germany is (still) the UK’s second-largest export market after the US. In Wales, the numbers taking a foreign language are even lower: many more teenagers now take Welsh for GCSE, leaving less time for other languages.
Yet the shortage of teachers is only part of the story. One teacher after another told me that the problems go far deeper. The language curriculum is dull, they say, and bears little resemblance to the way people really talk to each other.
“No matter what the teachers do, the content isn’t engaging enough for the kids to want to study it,” says Abigail Parrish, a lecturer in languages education at the University of Sheffield and former teacher. “As English speakers, we don’t speak perfect English. The phrases and structures don’t resemble the things young people want to talk about with their friends.” A GCSE will teach students to produce sentences like “I enjoy these comedy films because the director is very good” rather than “What did you watch on Netflix last night?”
She says an emphasis on making yourself understood rather than, say, the perfect use of genders would help. Unexpectedly — or not, depending on what you think of Michael Gove’s curriculum reforms — the emphasis on grammar at the end of primary school doesn’t seem to have helped at all. “The amount of time I spent explaining to kids what an adjective was was mind-blowing. They don’t seem to retain that.”
“Why was the paper so random?” demands a girl on TikTok who sat French GCSE last year. “Me saying bye to my grade 9 after writing abt a dude finding a baby in a tree, getting married underwater with animals, buddy the robot… a canteen on fire, assistance dogs”. It sounds more entertaining than writing a letter to your French penfriend, as I did in 1991. But replacing the pedestrian with the downright weird is not necessarily helpful when you’re trying to make conversation with a barista in Bordeaux.
The big problem, says Vincent Everett, is that language alone is never enough for examiners. He is head of languages at a school in Norfolk. “It is only worthy if we give it intellectual heft by adding literature, essays, linguistics, politics, grammar. And so we end up with courses which only attract a few, precisely because they are only designed for a few.” He points out that more 16-19 year-olds learn French on Duolingo than study it for A-level. “And that’s as it should be! A-level is not suitable.”
To the frustration of teachers, language GCSEs and A-levels are marked more harshly than other subjects. An A* in German A-level demanded a score of 88 percent last year. For physics, it was 66 per cent. Pupils know this and choose their subjects accordingly; teachers know it and discourage weaker candidates from taking a language, as it will pull down the Progress 8 scores on which schools are judged.
One teacher told me it was particularly unfair to let native speakers take GCSEs in their own languages and downgrade the rest of the entrants by comparison. Another state school teacher told the British Council: “We may no longer offer German from September, as the GCSE cohort is so skewed to independent schools and is so small that our students are at a disadvantage.”
But the teachers I spoke to are not giving up. Alongside the frustration was determination to fight for their subject. Entries for Spanish GCSE were up a bit last year. GCSE Mandarin entries, which have been boosted by extra funding from the Department of Education and a great deal of help from Confucius Institutes, have also risen. (Whether this funding will continue, given the tensions with China, is uncertain.)
A new collaboration between University College London, the British Council and the Goethe-Institut is trying to reinvigorate teaching and reverse the decline in German. And from this September, language GCSEs have been “reformed” with the aim of making them more attractive.
Linguists say artificial intelligence will change the way we learn languages, but not the value of being able to speak them. “AI makes it redundant? Well, no,” says former French teacher Michael Slavinsky, who is piloting a scheme in Hounslow to enable state schools to collaborate so they can still offer language A-levels. “Spotify ended CDs, but it didn’t stop people going to live shows. The rest of the world speaks English? Well, yes, they do learn it, but then we only understand what the rest of the world wants us to understand!”
Parrish admits that most teenagers see little point in learning a language “right now” and think they can pick one up later on Duolingo. They might go on holiday to Spain but in many places everyone speaks English. The key is to “project further into the future — what company you might want to work for or adventures you might want to have.”
Should foreign languages just be made compulsory at GCSE again? No, she says. “People assume that as a linguist I think everyone should learn a language, but because of my understanding of motivation I don’t think compulsion is the way to go.”
Language exchanges can be worth the effort. Kids are often surprised, one teacher notes wryly, by how much they like Germany. But they are vulnerable to budget cuts and the greater emphasis on safeguarding in recent years, with families subject to background checks.
And most French and Spanish speakers don’t live in France and Spain, a fact that school textbooks have historically tended to ignore. Getting that right is difficult, says Everett. “Having lived in Mexico, I see some pretty horrific attempts at diversification of approaches in Spanish resources. Factual error, cultural appropriation, stereotypes.”
He uses lyrics by French musicians like the hip-hop duo Bigflo & Oli and Louane in his teaching: “For our pupils, they are the representatives of France. But when we study them, we learn that their parents came from other countries.”
It wasn’t planned, and may fall foul of tighter immigration restrictions, but recruiting more teachers from Africa and Latin America and fewer from Europe could end up changing the way French and Spanish are perceived by teenagers and taught in the classroom.
The election manifestos made no mention of languages. Britain has plenty of more urgent problems. But over the past two decades a new level of complacency has set in. The belief that the rest of the world can and should speak English is rarely spoken aloud: it sits uncomfortably with the tolerance and diversity that most of us want to show.
Yet as our ability to talk to other people in their own languages falls away, Britain becomes a suspicious, more inward-looking place, tolerating the rest of the world, but always on our own terms.
Ros Taylor hosts the Oh God, What Now?, Jam Tomorrow and Bunker podcasts, and is the author of The Future of Trust (Melville House)
