At the British Academy last week we released a report called Languages: State of the Nation. It analyses the worrying state of the present demand and provide of language skills in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and is the most recent in a chain of news and position papers we’ve dedicated in recent times to the declining status of languages in our colleges and universities. The purpose of all our work is to drive home the message that languages are vital for the overall healthiness of the education and research base, for UK business competitiveness and political standing, and for people and society at large.
The report draws on new data from a survey of UK employers and Labour Market Intelligence and demonstrates how we’re affected by a growing deficit in foreign language skills just at a time when the worldwide demand for language skills is expanding. Worse still, inside the words of the report, we’re trapped in a “vicious circle of monolingualism”. Employers reply to the weak supply of those skills in a single of 2 ways. The 1st is to realign their market, choosing to deal only with people who speak English, and therefore remove language requirements from their job adverts. Alternatively, in the event that they are really pushed, they train existing staff with language skills or hire native speakers. Either way there aren’t any market incentives for learners and little pressure on government to prioritise these skills.
Luckily, it is not all bad news. We are able to and will celebrate the variety in our schoolchildren, in addition to in our world-leading educational institutions. There’s a plentiful supply of multilingual skills in UK society – one in six school children in England speak a foreign language as a mother tongue. Census data released just last month confirm just how plentiful this resource is within the UK. More must to be done to unlock this talent. We have to make sure that our education system enables and enhances the UK’s aspirations for growth and global influence. Demand already exceeds our current capacity.
And we must ensure that the perfect messages are becoming through to children in schools if we’re to bridge the space between the education and employment sectors.
We need too with the intention that, regardless of the precise form the English Baccalaureate Certificates or its successor takes, languages have a prominent place as disciplines within that scheme, whether those are the most important European languages traditionally taught in our faculties or languages like Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Hindi and Indonesian that allows you to surely have an ever increasing presence on earth today’s children will live and work in. And we must reverse the disturbing trend for those languages to become the preserve of the associated fee-paying schools and Russell Group universities.
Last week we launched our second year of faculties Language Awards. The awards aim to encourage excellence in language learning in schools within the UK. Applicants from both mainstream and supplementary schools are invited to illustrate innovative and attainable plans for making improvements to take-up and exuberance for language learning beyond the age of 16.
The 2012 National Winner, Dallam School, impressed the judging panel with its bilingual groups in years 7, 8 and 9, where PSHE and diverse humanities lessons are run entirely in another language. This ensures that scholars get extra exposure to that language on an afternoon-to-day basis, including daily routines and informal banter in these busy, mixed ability groups. That’s supplemented by bilingual activities inclusive of Europe and international days, adventure learning, spelling bees, film studies, French cookery days, visiting and exchange opportunities to countries and additional time with foreign language assistants.
In short, we want a brand new strategic technique to stimulate both demand and provide. We must find better ways of identifying and expressing the desire for languages. But we’re not ranging from scratch. Our best challenge lies in building at the firm foundations that exist already in our society in order that we will be able to reply to the opportunities that the long run holds.
Professor Nigel Vincent is vp on the British Academy for the arts and Social Sciences.
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