The crisis in language education in England is real, and much attention is paid to the number of students opting out of studying languages, voting with their feet the moment they have the first opportunity to do so. But this is not the story that matters right now.
Across the UK, there are university-led programmes bucking the trend by enthusing young linguists and increasing uptake in schools. These programs demand attention; if we can better understand what teachers and learners are seeking out and returning to, then we’ll have a proper basis for developing effective advocacy interventions and informing curriculum change.
What these programs have in common is that they show, rather than tell, young learners the value of learning a language. Universities are well placed to do this, because they have ready access to the rich cultural content needed to run these programmes, and the inspiring individuals to deliver it – in particular, their student body via ambassador programmes. Here, I look closely at one university-led programme that is seeing tangible impact on the uptake of languages in schools, and make recommendations that can turn this and similar programs into a strategic national approach to languages advocacy.
At The Queen’s College, Oxford, we have developed a suite of languages advocacy programmes that motivate thousands of young learners across the UK every year. The principle of these programmes is simple: they provide rich cultural content, with which learners interact creatively. These creative cultural activities embed advocacy in the learning experience, because they show learners how relevant and rewarding it is to be a linguist, rather than telling them so and hoping they will believe it.
Teachers and learners are voting in favor of this approach, with over 20,000 participants in the past year, and evidence of increased uptake at GCSE and A Level. A 12-year-old participant in one of our teacher-led programmes neatly sums up what we consistently hear from teachers: “Sir, this feels important.”
The content that learners encounter in the classroom matters hugely, and cultural content makes languages relevant and creative, while encouraging critical thinking. Many teachers also cite the opportunity this content provides to bring new voices into the classroom, diversifying an otherwise Eurocentric curriculum.
This increased interest and inclusion leads directly to increased uptake, with 87 teachers reporting improved GCSE uptake last year due to participation in one of our programs, and many also reporting positive impact on A level numbers. This impact on uptake is growing year on year, suggesting significant promise from a small, thinly resourced project. Imagine what could happen if we scaled this up and linked it to other successful projects, positioned strategically across the country.
Enough of the doom, then. Alternative stories are available, which suggest ready-made solutions. But these exist ad hoc in pockets of excellent practice across the UK. Because they are rarely joined up, they cannot build on shared learning, nor can they systematically target cold spots.
We do not need to invent new ways of engaging pupils; we need to scrutinise and scale up existing successful practices into one national, systematic, strategic effort.
Key players recognized this six years ago when ‘Towards a National Languages Strategy’ proposed what is now The Languages Gateway, a cross-sector initiative to raise the profile of languages and increase uptake. Inspired in part by the hugely successful STEM campaign, The Languages Gateway is currently mapping effective university-led projects like ours, drawing out common threads that help us to understand what works best and why. This will develop a basis for sustainable and systematic university-school partnerships that reach the schools where advocacy is needed the most.
What we ultimately learn from our projects is that the current curriculum is not giving teachers and learners what they need. Interventions of this kind are no real substitute for curriculum change, but they are an essential and very cost-effective staging post on the way there: they can inform that change by showing us what engages learners and improves uptake; and they can shore up the pipeline while we await refreshed curriculum content.
Two measures will immediately realise this potential:
- Funding for small-scale empirical research, to underpin an understanding of how and why these university-led programs increase uptake – both to improve advocacy and to inform curriculum change.
- Improved resourcing for the most impactful university-led advocacy projects, and for their coordination by The Languages Gateway, to ensure that these projects engage every school in a systematic way.
This strategic approach will have a palpable impact on languages uptake within the next three years, because it builds on existing good practice and capitalises on collaboration. This is how we can begin to forge a new kind of languages education: one imbued with meaningful content, in which every lesson feels ‘important’ to all.
