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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I shall use a foreign language to say, ““Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose””. I cannot forget that years ago when I was Secretary of State for Education we endeavoured to bring in French to schools for children at the age of eight, with the suggestion that there should be a second foreign language at the age of 12 when children had gone into the upper school. We started a special language teachers’ college, and we tried to encourage people to go in and to learn other languages. There was a big upsurge, as the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, will find out, in the study particularly of Russian at that time, followed quite closely by Spanish. There was quite a widespread fashion in schools to learn Russian because of the significance of Russia in the 1970s and 1980s, and Spanish became a more popular subject. I do not quite know why so much of that initiative has withered on the vine. It may have been partly the outcome of financial reductions proportionately in educational spending. I completely agree with the noble Baronesses, Lady Buscombe and Lady Howe, that this is a disaster. A country such as ours, if it expects to go on being successful, even in the most direct economic terms, cannot expect to be taken terribly seriously, or to get contracts, or to win service contracts in particular if it is completely unable to speak any language but its own. It is not very easy to conduct diplomacy entirely in one’s own language; it makes one very unpopular with foreign powers. But it is much more than that; it is about a kind of narrowing of the whole sense of the world’s culture and it is an inability to know any of the literature of other countries in a world that is becoming increasingly interdependent. It means that Britain in many ways is impoverished by the simple incapacity to speak anyone else’s language. It is not only about language, but about thinking in the way that other people think. I remember years ago, when I was teaching in Africa, hearing one French African say to another, ““Voila l’esprit Cartésien””. That was is the middle of a desert in Senegal. I could not help thinking that there was something quite staggering about French culture when all those miles away from metropolitan France people can talk about l’esprit Cartésien. That tells you something about other cultures, other languages and other countries and the contribution that they can make to the world’s civilisation. So I strongly support the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, in her amendments, and I am certain that the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, will listen very carefully because I am sure that his heart is already with the debate.