AS THE new term starts across England, schools are chewing over this summer’s results in the 16-plus exams. One trend is clear–the coalition’s emphasis on pupils achieving five core academic subjects, including a language, in its new EBACC (English Baccalaureate) qualification has raised the number of candidates taking language exams.
This marks a reversal of a long period in which English schools turned out a rising number of monoglots (see chart). The past two decades have witnessed a sharp decline in the numbers of teenagers poring over French verbs, let alone the oddities of German, which as Mark Twain, a 19th-century American writer, observed, renders a girl neuter but a turnip feminine.
In 1993 over 315,000 pupils sat the 16-plus exam in French, compared with just over 177,000 this year. German had 108,000 entrants in 1993; there are fewer than 63,000 now. Only Spanish fared better, with 91,000 GCSE entrants this year, rising from 32,000 in 1993. Largely to blame for the slump was a decision by the Labour government in 2002 to end the compulsory status of a language in secondary schools. That accelerated a longer period of modern-languages decline, as pupils switched to subjects perceived to be easier or more practical. Now the coalition is claiming that the rise in this year’s exam entries at 16 marks the first step to correcting the resulting monolingualism. Yet progress has been modest–the number of GCSE French entrants, for example, merely returned to 2010 levels, around half the numbers of the 1990s.