Charles Forsdick can still remember the garlicky sauce on his first platter of snails, sampled as a 13-year-old on a school exchange in Alsace.
“I stayed with a family that had a restaurant and was able to try these exotic dishes we did not have in Norfolk in the 1980s. For many years, I happily ate snails — and I first ate them in Alsace as a teenager. They were magnificent,” he said.
In the 1980s most British teenagers, such as Forsdick, would have travelled abroad to France on a school exchange, enjoying the “transformative power” of experiencing a different cuisine, culture and language. They might have been too scared to speak much French, but would at least have stumbled through schoolboy phrases, such as “Comment t’appelles-tu?”
Not any more. The study of the language of one of our closest European neighbours and trading partners is in crisis. The number of children studying A-level French has collapsed from 22,700 in 1996 to just 7,000 this year.
At A-level, modern languages attract tiny numbers of pupils compared with subjects such as maths (101,230 entries this year), psychology (76,130), history (43,410), and other subjects in the top five. French fell out of the top ten in 1997, and is now only number 25.
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Next year, Spanish is set to overtake French as the most popular language GCSE for the first time, according to Sunday Times analysis. About 130,000 children sat each of the subjects this summer, but if current trends continue, 4,000 more students will sit Spanish than French in 2025.
• GCSE pupils shun languages amid fears they won’t help career
Forsdick, now the Drapers professor of French at Cambridge University, said the statistics are “extremely sobering” and everyone acknowledges the “gravity of the situation”. “We are doing all we can,” he said.
The crisis — partly triggered by the scrapping of the rule, in 2004, that used to force all teenagers to sit a foreign language GCSE — is not confined to schools. A study to be published by the University Council for Languages on Monday reveals that 14 departments of modern languages, most offering French and German degrees, have closed in the past decade, including the University of Hull and Anglia Ruskin University.
Amid fears that the study of French will become an elitist pursuit, academics — even from Oxford and Cambridge — are visiting schools to try to drum up recruits to apply to study French. Just two students apply for every place on a modern language degree at Oxford University. For computer science, it is 20.
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Earlier this year, only strike threats and a lobby involving Scottish folk musicians and a debate in the Scottish parliament stopped plans to scrap single-honours degrees, including in French, at Aberdeen University.
Wendy Ayres-Bennett, emerita professor of French philology at Cambridge, who carried out the survey of modern language department closures, said a monolingual generation might be emerging. They will be unable to hold their own in the informal chats that follow diplomatic and commercial meetings on the Continent, where she said the real business is often done.
French, said Ayres-Bennett, needs “the Mary Beard” effect. Beard, a broadcaster and former professor of classics at Cambridge, has transformed the appeal of classics with her TV programmes such as Meet the Romans and Pompeii.
Bridget Phillipson, the new education secretary, paid tribute to her “inspiring” languages teacher, Zahida Hammond, who taught her Spanish for GCSE, in a video featured in Labour’s manifesto. Phillipson, who attended a Roman Catholic state secondary school, went on to read history and French at Oxford.
Last August, Labour released figures showing that French was among 18 subjects that had increasingly been taught in secondary schools by unqualified teachers since 2017. While the party has not published a national strategy for languages, one of its top pledges is to pay for 6,500 new specialist teachers, including in foreign languages, using an estimated £1.5 billion raised by slapping VAT on private schools.
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Now a search is under way for high-flying linguists who will promote the joys of French to the next generation. “The Mary Beard factor is very interesting. She has managed to make classics popular and mainstream TV,” said Ayres-Bennett. “We need more such figures to promote languages.”
More teenagers are now doing A-levels in classical subjects, such as Latin, than German. Over the past decade, German A-level entries have fallen by 39 per cent.
One of the biggest problems is that there are so few French teachers since Brexit. A study by the British Council next week will reveal that more than half of the 1,300 secondary schools surveyed said they had struggled to find a qualified languages teacher.
• German A-levels halved: why modern languages are in freefall
Vicky Gough, an expert in foreign languages at the British Council, said that after Brexit many French teachers working in English schools and universities left Britain.
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The government is now paying French people bursaries of £25,000 a year to come and train as language teachers in the UK but it has recently scrapped relocation payments of £10,000 to help them move here. “I do think there is a risk of a generation of British schoolchildren becoming Little Englanders,” said Gough.
Hugo Jasniak, 22, from Lille, has just finished training as a French teacher at University College London but said it is “hard for anyone French to move to the UK to be a teacher because of the increasing impediments caused by work visas, NHS costs and immigration barriers”.
Jasniak, who will begin his first full-time job at a state school in east London in September, recommends that parents should allow their children to watch Tintin to switch them on to the language. He loves teaching — but fears the shortage of teachers in British schools will only get worse.
School trips and exchanges have also collapsed and foreign language assistants — who could enthuse children with talk of French or German music, political rows and amusing scandals — have also largely disappeared, especially from state schools, if not private, Gough said.
“Young people, to travel to France, have to get a passport and visa. Coaches are reluctant to take school groups because it is a hassle. Everyone has to get off at Dover and have papers checked. The government has arranged for French children to travel to the UK with identity cards. If something like that could be done for British children that would be helpful,” she added.
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The drop in A-level and GCSE French entries is part of a wider trend too, in which teenagers shun languages and arts subjects in favour of maths and computer science, subjects thought more likely to lead to a well-paid career.
“The UK is an island and then there is Brexit on top of that, a further isolation,” said Jasniak. “If you want to increase connections with the world — discover new ways of living and thinking — then it is really important British schoolchildren learn French.”
He would be happy if, by the time they were 16, his pupils could say: “Je suis content d’avoir appris le français parce que j’aimerais vivre à l’étranger.” (I am happy to have learnt French because I would like to live abroad.)
