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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I also urge my noble friend Lord Dearing on his way. I wish him the best of luck and I congratulate the Government on having the idea. The great irony is that in this country we have the reputation of being monolingual. In fact, we are the most multilingual country in western Europe. We ignore that at our peril. Most of the languages that are spoken are either unfashionable or dangerous. Being monolingual, when we talk of speaking a foreign language in this country, we think only of the Anglo-Saxons in our midst. They are the people who are monolingual. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, rightly mentioned the problem we have in motivating people. The fact that English is misleadingly referred to as a world language helps to disincentivise our young. I hope that when my noble friend Lord Dearing gets down to business, he will not look upon GCE or even the old CSE as the appropriate models for foreign language learning, but will look more towards the model for music testing. Under the music criteria, a child learns a little at grade one on violin or piano and acquires a sense of achievement when he gets there. At grade five there is a link across to music GCSE. I think we shall have great difficulty in teaching British children French, German and Spanish unless we can find new ways of motivating and encouraging them to learn those languages.