Gatwick Airport South Terminal, England. 11.19.
I’m on my way to Athens to celebrate with an old friend who is tying the knot with his long-time partner in a beautiful ceremony in a chapel that looks out over the Aegean Sea. I should be ecstatic but I’m feeling downhearted at the moment on account of the GCSE results. They weren’t shoddy, by any stretch, but they were way off what we hoped they’d be – and it all comes down to the grade boundaries.
It’s got me thinking a lot about how we treat languages in the UK.
Back in 2006, an article by the BBC reported that the study of foreign languages had reached the “point of no return”. Only two years prior, Tony Blair’s Labour government had taken the decision to make MFL non-compulsory post-14, after which thousands of students elected to ditch French, Spanish and German from their curricula. While Spanish has seen a decent recovery from the initial “freefall” recorded – bouncing back from 62.413 in 2006 to 132.680 in 2026 – German has been less fortunate, continuing to decline in popularity nationwide: the relatively healthy 90.311 studying German in 2006 have been whittled down to 32.525 this summer. Some schools are now considering whether it is economically viable to continue to offer languages, which command smaller and smaller classes by the year. Northern Ireland is thinking of scrapping the study of German altogether.
As a language teacher, I naturally don’t like where this is going. What makes things worse, however, are the barriers within the surviving MFL syllabi. There are a number of factors blighting the study of languages that aren’t helping us to promote them in lieu of the flashier, brash-ier and cash–ier subjects like Economics and Business Studies.
The MFL GCSEs are a mixed bag. Sometimes they feel formulaic and predictable. At others they can be surprisingly progressive, asking candidates to describe a photograph about sports where half the players on a basketball court are in wheelchairs, or a family scene showing a same-sex couple and an adopted child of a totally different ethnicity. This year’s Listening dictation task in the Pearson Edexcel features the infamous “Ma petite sœur est bisexuelle”, read by a childlike voice that really threw my students, who might well have spent the two repeats wondering how and why a little girl would have already decided to self-identify as bisexual – and in the middle of their GCSE exam, no less. I’m glad we’re on the frontier of pushing positive representation, but I can imagine the response in the nation’s more conservative Muslim students and their families.
Recruiting for A Level is an uphill task with or without the competition from maths and the three sciences – especially with Further Maths elbowing a fourth subject out of the picture so often – since MFL A Levels can be fiendishly hard, relying more on the candidate’s ability to retain a vast breadth of knowledge both historical, political and literary in both spoken and written formats. Add to that the sky-high grade boundaries driven at least in part by the large number of native speakers who take the subject for an easy A and you have a whole host of reasons why students think twice about studying languages. They’re definitely a hard A Level, I’m not about to deny that, but if we don’t get the numbers, we run the risk of leading our country and its children into even more of a monolingual and inward-facing nightmare than the one we’re already weaving, spurred on by the global ill-sentiment toward the ongoing refugee crisis and the perceived erosion of our national identity.
I’m not sure what to suggest. I do what I can to make learning languages as fun and inclusive as possible. I’m sure I’m not the best at what I do – especially since I’ve always seen languages as a pathway to meeting people and telling stories, rather than finding any particular joy in their acquisition for its own sake – but I work hard together with my colleagues year on year to try and convince our students that speaking a second language competently (that is, post-GCSE) is an increasingly rare gift among the English which will take them so far.
I might use this trip of mine as an example. For the first time in a long time, I’m going to be completely at sea. I might be able to speak seven languages with varying degrees of fluency, but I don’t speak a word of Greek. I’m so used to being able to muscle in and go native in Spanish, French and Italian that suddenly finding myself in a situation where I can’t manage much more than thank you and goodbye is extremely disorienting. Sure, I could speak English at them and expect to be understood – but that just strikes me as rude at best and colonial at worst.
I’m tuning in, slowly, but it’s hard from zero. Alex is my host, but he’s the one getting married, so I can’t expect him to spend his weekend translating for me. There’s so much I’d love to do. I’d love to know what Petros from Naxos is recounting, since he seems to have a raft of stories with proper Greek gusto. I’m dying to know what Alex’s brother is saying when he’s clearly running through some of the steps for the dances. I’d like to ask Alex who the girl is with the smile of an angel in the corner of the room. But I can’t do any of these things, because I can’t speak Greek.
Monolingualism is an enormous handicap. Even a capable linguist should remind themselves of the gift they have earned by putting themselves in a position where they are truly lost every so often, if only as a reminder of how precious the ability to move from one language to another really is.
I’ll paraphrase the above for my students when I get back. Whatever it takes to buck the national trend and fight the death of MFL, I’ll do it. I just wish we’d been given a fair idea of the new spec grade boundaries a year ago, so our students knew just how much harder they had to work to get what they deserved.
My body clock is all over the place. Three hours ago I was in the UK, two hours behind Greece – but five hours ahead of Chile, and seven hours ahead of the Galápagos Islands, where I was until Saturday. Little wonder I’m having trouble sleeping.
I’ll report on tonight’s events together with tomorrow’s in one big fat Greek wedding post. I just thought I’d sandwich my thoughts on languages into my funk over the grades.
It’s gone two in the morning, which is approaching my usual bedtime in the UK, but probably only halfway through tomorrow night’s festivities which are due to go on until the dawn. I’d better try to get some sleep tonight at least. BB x
The Book of Barnabas 