Dumping languages stunts life chances, schools are told
Poll shows only a third of state schools teach the majority of their pupils a foreign language, while almost all private schools do
State schools were accused of disqualifying their pupils from top jobs today after it emerged that little more than a third of them now teach the majority of their pupils a foreign language.
The number of state schools abandoning languages at GCSE is on the increase and follows years of steady decline. Meanwhile, private schools show no signs of giving up on languages and increasingly offer pupils the chance to study Mandarin and Japanese, a study has shown.
The National Centre for Languages known as CiLT polled 711 schools, 145 of them private.
It found that last year, just 36% of the state schools surveyed taught a foreign language to the majority of pupils aged 14 or 15. This is a drop on the year before, when 41% of state schools did so.
In contrast, 94% of the private schools surveyed taught a foreign language to the majority of their pupils aged 14 or 15 last year. This is consistent with previous years.
Studying a foreign language was compulsory up to the age of 16 in only a fifth of the state schools, compared to 89% of the private schools, the report found. Mandarin was taught in 37% of the private schools, but only 16% of the state schools. Japanese and Spanish were taught in 19% and 94% of the private schools, but only 8% and 76% of the state schools.
Kathryn Board, CiLT's chief executive, said that languages were crucial to closing the gap in achievement between state and private school pupils.
"The coalition government has talked about closing the gap what's happening with languages is that the gap is widening, not closing."
She added: "Many, many more children in state schools have to have the opportunity to learn a language, and understand the benefit of learning a language, for social mobility, for employment as well as for leisure.
"Young people coming out of university with language! degrees , after medicine, are the most employable of all graduates. International and global trade is the norm and I think it's obvious that young people who either have another language, or the capacity to learn another language quickly, are going to be more employable than mono-linguists."
Professor Mike Kelly, programme director of Links into Languages, which offers training for language teachers, warned that in future most universities would want applicants to have the government's new English baccalaureate. To gain the English bac, students must achieve at least a C at GCSE in English, maths, science, a humanities subject and a foreign language.
"At the moment, universities are finding it very difficult to recruit language undergraduates from the maintained sector, as a result of which increasing proportions of students doing languages degrees are from independent schools," he said.
"This is a serious worry for universities who, of course, want to widen participation as far as possible."
The take-up of languages has been in sharp decline in state schools since 2004, when the government made the subject optional for pupils aged 14 and over. The government is conducting a review into the curriculum which many hope will see languages reintroduced as a compulsory subject to 16.
Teachers have criticised the new syllabus for language GCSEs for being dull and unstimulating, with an excessively harsh marking scheme, CiLT said.
In some schools, pupils had as little as one hour a week of language teaching between the ages of 11 and 14, the organisation said.
The most popular foreign language in schools is still French, and more schools now offer Spanish than German.
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