Earlier this year, I wrote a blog entry entitled Languages in a lamentable state – that state being, of course, the UK. This morning a BBC News article outlines renewed efforts to address the country's woeful inability to learn and use foreign languages and feel once again compelled to comment. So there's a cross-party group and we have phrases like "national recovery programme for languages" and "driving a languages revival" being bandied around. So far, so meaningless.
For once, at least, we now have a few figures to quantify the scale of the problem and proposals offered by the All-Party Parliamentary Group's chairman, Baroness Coussins, to tackle it:
"The UK economy is already losing around £50bn a year in lost contracts because of a lack of language skills in the workforce.
"And we aren't just talking about high-flyers: in 2011 over
27% of admin and clerical jobs went unfilled because of the languages
deficit."
To me, these two statements perfectly illustrate the lack of understanding of the issues. We all know what the difference between a "high-flyer" and someone doing an admin and clerical job is, don't we? No, actually, we don't – and neither do the politicians. This is because, historically, the advantages of being able to use a foreign language competently and professionally are never outlined. As a result, investing the time required to learn a language to graduate level might even be seen as naive in some quarters. You can set up all the MPs' talking shops you like, it's now been fifteen years since I graduated; yet online job sites are still flooded with customer service positions (file under 'admin and clerical') offering the same £17k p.a. that they were paying in 1999. And if the country really is losing billions in lost contracts to the UK's multilingual competitors, then this is surely evidence that no-one in the UK really cares, anyway.
But fear not, foreign-language friends – help is on its way:
"The Department for Education said £350,000 was being spent in England
in the next year to help primary and secondary teachers improve their
teaching of languages."
Clearly we can spend the equivalent of around ten teachers' modest full-time salaries to cover the whole of England and the problem will go away. Get a good and enthusiastic linguist teaching in a primary school and you might – just might – have a handful of young people taking a foreign language at GCSE or 'A' Level a decade or so later. If you're very lucky, one or two may even study languages at university. But that's wishful thinking:
"A spokesman added: "We are making it compulsory for children
to learn a foreign language from age seven to 14, a move supported by
91% of respondents to our consultation on languages in primary schools."
The above statement shows that although just under half of state-school pupils go on to take a GCSE in a foreign language (itself an appalling statistic, especially when we don't know how many of them actually pass with a good grade); there is no intention to make studying a foreign language up to GCSE at age 16 compulsory. Numbers of students studying languages at university will continue to decline. So unless you can get young people with (pre-) GCSE-level French, German, Spanish or Italian to man the phones in customer service jobs, those contracts will still be lost and the state of foreign language learning in the UK will go from lamentable to, frankly, laughable.
