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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I very much support these amendments. My children went to the French lycée aged four and mopped up French like sponges. That is the age when children begin to learn language. Although initially I was delighted that the maintained system would by 2010 offer children aged 10, for the first time, the chance to choose a foreign language, nevertheless I could not help reflecting that in most independent schools there was no question of having an option. You were taught a foreign language. You may not have enjoyed it much but you jolly well got used to it. Now we are in this disastrous situation, which seems to have got worse since 2003, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe. That is clearly due to the fact that foundation status was removed at that stage. It is very worrying indeed that at the secondary stage there are so few pupils now taking the subject voluntarily. We are also seeing very few going on to read foreign languages at university, so we have a growing spiral of horror. I urge the Government to think in terms of recruiting more people. One or two suggestions have been made—for example, recruiting people who are perhaps over here doing other jobs and who have foreign languages. Even within our own community, there are people who have considerable skills in modern foreign languages. We should be recruiting them to help us—as a temporary measure, if you like—to get over this problem and to reinstate foreign languages. I commend the Minister for the interest that he has clearly taken in this issue, not just because I have as a result had the dance mat sent to me. There has also been a lot of activity in terms of helping the individual. I commend the BBC’s attempts in the interactive programme ““jam””, which children and those with special needs can take particular advantage of. It is also open to teachers to interact in the same sort of way. You have the same situation as the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, was talking about, where you could learn from a screen updated with the internet. As far as I am concerned, the earlier this is done, the better, and you should make it attractive in whatever way you like. You could have daily a language of the week. As has been pointed out, we have all these different languages, and everyone could speak their own and show the different words that are used in their mother tongues. I urge the Government to please do anything that they can on this issue and to treat it as a matter of urgency.