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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, one trouble with the French is that they cannot admit that Descartes was wrong. I entirely support the spirit of my noble friend’s amendment. It seems enormously important that we should get ourselves to a position where we find foreign languages easy, as many other European nations do. The learning of languages is clearly not inherent to us in a genetic sense; it is something that we have allowed to develop as a cultural artefact. Having been top dogs for a long time, we do not realise that we cannot now ““boss it around”” in the way that we used to. Although we have the great privilege of English being the international business language, it will clearly be under threat from Chinese. The Chinese are determined to make their language the business language of the East and they are putting a lot of money into that. I am delighted that we are responding through the British Council to keep English in there. One way and another, we are going to find ourselves in a world where we need to speak foreign languages and, in any case, doing so is a matter of courtesy. If you are dealing seriously with people from another country, it is clear that you, one of your colleagues or someone in the business must understand them, their culture and their language. This should be, as it is in so many other European countries, something that we generate ourselves. As the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, said, language learning has to start at the earliest stages, when it is easy. I have the habit of buying DVDs on eBay and, from time to time, I end up with some fairly strange products. So, when I have not quite read what it is I am buying, my daughter watches ““Shrek”” in Cantonese and various other things in French and Mandarin. But she absorbs and enjoys them, and one picks up the occasional foreign word in her conversation—it seems to be a natural facility at that age. As my noble friend Lady Buscombe said, there are many good products out there at the moment. There are self-education courses aimed at almost every level. It does not require teachers to know the language; they can learn it along with the pupils. Indeed, having an inexperienced teacher helps you to learn to use the product and to get over problems. We could set out on a journey together in Russian, my teacher and I, and I do not need her to start with a word of it. So long as she understands how the process works, we can follow the same course together and help each other to get over the hurdles. That can happen at any age. We do not need a great cohort of people speaking whatever language in primary schools. What are we going to dictate to primary schools that they should do? We need only give them the facilities and the encouragement so that they can pick up on a lot of material that is out there and explore languages with their pupils. They can give those pupils a facility and make it seem easy to them. They can make it seem that languages are not the enormous hurdle that they have come to be seen to be—the hard discipline or the GCSE that is hardest to get through. Languages should trip easily off the tongue. I am absolutely delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, has been given the job that he has. It means that we have two people to speak to this evening: the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, and the Minister—and I hope that we can convince at least one of them. I hope that the noble Lord will take an interest in the music examination system, which, it seems to me, has always had a great deal of application in languages. It should be taken in small steps. The split between playing and theory also seems to fit very well with languages. You can have just the speaking—the enjoyment—of the language to a certain level and allow the theory to lag behind but then catch up later. That is certainly how people get caught into the system of music exams. They may well reach grade 5 without knowing much theory but then realise that they have to catch up. But, by that stage, they are already on the ladder and—whoosh—the theory comes on from behind. On the other hand, the two peg together so that, by the time you are getting anywhere serious, you are level-pegging on theory and on the enjoyment side. There is a lot of hope if only we can realise what it out there, how easy it is to learn languages and how much can be done without enormous expenditure or training and without a great deal of dislocation. One thing we must do is ensure that we motivate schools to teach languages. At the moment one can drop languages, take up media studies or whatever and there is no difference at all; there are the same results and the same motivation. We have to make it clear that languages are to be valued and that they must be reported on separately so that schools can focus on them. Let them use their ingenuity and the facilities with which we provide them to decide how, with their pupils, they will make progress in languages. There is a great deal of expertise and understanding out there about how to teach pupils. Let it go. Let us not have the problem we had a few years ago when a wonderful course called ““business studies in Spanish”” was pioneered by Millais School, a state comprehensive in Horsham. It was killed by the QCA, which said, ““We’re not having this; it is far too expensive; it is not standard; we will charge you £50,000 a year to ensure it is up to standard””, and so it died. That is entirely the wrong attitude. We have to let lots of people try lots of different ways of motivating pupils who come from a background where there is no incentive to learn languages. We want them to pick up languages and enjoy them. Given that kind of spirit, we will get somewhere.