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Dept for Education and Skills

Answer

Helen Jones: To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills what steps he is taking to ensure that there are adequate numbers of teachers available to teach foreign languages in primary schools. [197640] Mr. Charles Clarke: There has been considerable progress on the development of language learning in primary schools, underpinned by the launch in December 2002 of the Government's National Languages Strategy for England. Implementation of the Strategy is being driven by Lid King, the National Director for Languages. The Strategy recognises the importance of developing a workforce and resources to support successful implementation of primary language learning, and much of our work to date has focussed on these areas. In developing a school workforce, we are building up a cadre of specialist teachers and non-teacher specialists to support primary language learning. 580 places have been allocated this year for Primary Initial Teacher Training with a specialism in French, German, Spanish or Italian, and we intend to expand this programme further next year. This means that over 1200 teacher trainees will have been trained by the end of this year. In addition we have allocated 50 primary MFL places a year to the Graduate Teacher Programme. For existing teachers, we have funded primary MFL Advanced Skills Teacher posts and are working with the TTA to develop and pilot CPD courses for existing primary teachers to enhance language skills and MFL pedagogy. For non-teacher specialists, we are working with the British council to extend the foreign language assistants programme into primary schools, and are developing training for teaching assistants to support primary language learning.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

426 c925-6W;426 c929-30W; 197640

Session

2003-04

Subjects

Languages Staff Primary education Schools Teachers

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk