This year’s GCSE results show a welcome rise in overall entries, combined with a small increase in top pass rates and stability in the pass rate as a whole. The GCSE appears to have avoided the moving goalposts which bedevil the A level. The GCSE also has a significant strength: pupils tend to sit English, mathematics, a science and a language, providing a common base which A levels do not aspire to.
As ministers wrestle with options of varying merit for reforming the examination system for 14-19 year olds, one of these core subjects has already quietly been dropped. From next month, pupils will no longer have to learn a foreign language beyond the age of 14. This year’s GCSE results confirm a gradual decline in the study of foreign languages, with some 12,000 fewer entries than last year. They also underline a shift away from the learning of French and German, towards a more widespread and commercially useful language, Spanish.
The point of learning a language, however, goes well beyond acquiring the ability to do business in it. At GCSE level, commercial skill is hardly a consideration. Learning a language, at this stage, benefits the student in other, more important, ways: it gives him or her a deeper awareness and understanding of his or her mother tongue, of its grammar, its flexibility (or inflexibility), its history and its potential. It also broadens the mind beyond the borders of the United Kingdom, promoting appreciation of a different culture. As English becomes the dominant language across much of the world, this matters more, not less.
English is the international language of computers, air travel, of pop music, trade and, increasingly, diplomacy. The German engineering and telecoms firm, Siemens AG, has used English as its “corporate language” for six years. English is studied by three out of four secondary school pupils in Central Europe, bullying Russian, German and French into silence. The accession of these countries to the European Union is reinforcing the dominance of English as the language of the EU.
A British teenager might soon believe that his language rules the world. It does not. In China, Japan, the Middle East and Latin America, opportunities are extremely limited if one’s sole cultural achievement is to have mastered the ability to change a euro into a yuan, or a real. Britain will suffer from the restriction of the minds and linguistic prowess of the next generation.
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Two years ago the French, German, Italian and Spanish ambassadors joined forces to urge a greater emphasis on language teaching. They gave warning that exchanges would become impossible to organise if British children were tongue-tied once they had managed a “bonjour”. The Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, assured them that a new national strategy would give all children an “entitlement” to study at least one European language in primary school by 2010. Thus far, the enthusiasm of secondary schools to drop languages from the curriculum has not been matched by the eagerness of primary schools to take them on.
The Government must not let languages slip from an education system which might then foster a generation of arrogant and insular Brits, clutching their new-style examination passes. Ministers should act now because with just a few years’ slippage, it could be too late, as still more language teachers drift off and student interest wanes further.What has happened to Latin in schools today could happen to French and Spanish tomorrow. And by the time the country wakes up to what it has lost, mei you banfa, as the Chinese might say — nothing to be done about it.