*Sian Griffiths, Education Editor | Graphics by Venetia Menzies, August 12 2023, The Sunday Times*
When Katrin Sredzki-Seamer came to England from Germany in 1990 and later started teaching German at a secondary school, pupils could be quite negative. “Children would bring up Fawlty Towers and that episode, ‘Don’t mention the war’,” she recalled.
Despite the imitations of Basil Fawlty and the teasing, she said it was a golden age for language teaching. Until 2004 it was compulsory to study a foreign language, usually French or German, at GCSE.
Not any more. The study of both is in crisis.
Over the past ten years, the number of children in England sitting German A-level has almost halved from 3,999 in 2013. It had fallen to 2,646 last year, according to the Joint Council for Qualifications, and has dropped to just 2,186 this year. In 2003, 6,429 children sat the exam.
The fall in French A-level numbers is almost as grim, dropping from 10,249 in 2013 to 6,429 this year. The A-level results will be published on Thursday.
As fewer children learn languages there is a lack of qualified teachers. After the Brexit referendum in 2016, many French and German teachers that Sredzki-Seamer knew who were working in English schools and universities left Britain.
Experts warn that teenagers, especially boys who are much less likely to study a language at A-level than girls, risk becoming “little Englanders”, who do not know the basics of how to communicate in France, Germany, or any country where English is not spoken.
Next month French and Germans trained as language teachers are being offered a £10,000 relocation payment to come to English schools. It is part of an emergency recruitment drive by ministers to try to plug classroom vacancies.
As part of the same recruitment drive by the Department for Education, French and German citizens are being offered up to £27,000 to train as language teachers in England, in a scholarship scheme organised by the British Council.
“There are not enough homegrown teachers,” said Vicky Gough, an expert in foreign languages at the council. “We are recruiting German speakers from Germany and French speakers from France to train as teachers this year. We have 175 bursaries worth £27,000 each, then they can get a visa to come and study here and teach languages.”
Charles Forsdick, the James Barrow professor of French at Liverpool University, who will soon take up a chair at Cambridge, said: “England has a language education crisis: fewer people are studying languages at school and university language programmes are closing. We must ensure we get EU nationals back in language classrooms.”
The decline in GCSE entries is also dramatic. While many schools still insist that a child does at least one language at GCSE, many do not since the rules changed in 2004. The number sitting French GCSE has fallen from 165,127 in 2013 to 123,111 this year. In 2003, when children still had to sit at least one foreign language GCSE, 308,342 sat the exam.
Spanish is the only language that has more children sitting exams at GCSE and A-level but the rise is overshadowed by the far bigger fall in French and German. The number taking A-level Spanish is up 7.2 per cent since 2013, but the number taking German is down 45.3 per cent over the same period.
The drop in children choosing languages for GCSE and A-levels is part of a wider trend as teenagers shun arts subjects such as English literature and drama in favour of maths and computer science, which are thought more likely to lead to a well-paid career.
Language learning, Gough said, risked becoming the preserve of “middle-class girls.”
She added: “We did a survey a year ago that showed parents of boys are less likely than parents of girls to say to them learning languages is a good thing. So it becomes a trend that middle-class girls study languages. There are more entries at A-level and GCSE from girls. Boys doing languages is a real issue.”
While 7,671 children sat French A-level exams in 2021, only 2,194 were boys. With German, there were only 981 boys among the 2,507 children who took the exam.
Sredzki-Seamer, who directs a national programme to train language teachers directly in schools, said: “Boys think it is too hard. They get embarrassed. Teenagers also struggle with making a fool of themselves. It puts you on the spot having to speak out loud. That can be scary.”
School trips and exchanges have also collapsed, particularly since Covid, and foreign language assistants, who could enthuse children with talk of French or German music, films, gossip and political rows, have largely disappeared.
“When I was a pupil in east Germany I went on an exchange to Russia aged 14 and stayed with a Russian family,” said Sredzki-Seamer, who was head of German at a secondary school. “It was life changing. You are scared, you struggle to make yourself understood but you find your way and are proud of yourself afterwards.”
As a teacher of German she would also run school trips to Koblenz, where the Moselle meets the Rhine, and take children “to a wine cellar, nine-pin bowling or to an open-air swimming pool to experience the culture — then have coffee and cake”.
There would also be school trips to Normandy: “We would take them to a château and do Masterchef and a local market and visit some World War Two bunkers.”
Gough said the number of schools with links overseas had fallen since Brexit. Surveys showed that “11 per cent had no links then, now 36 per cent of state schools say they have no links. And children have to get visas to travel and teachers have heard about the delays at passport control.”
The importance of learning French or German was more vital than ever after Brexit, she said. “We need open-minded citizens who understand people do things differently in other countries. There is a risk of getting locked down in a little Englander mentality at a time when we are changing our role on the world stage and are no longer part of Europe. We need more people who can deal with, and understand ,people from other cultures, and being able to speak other languages is critical,” she said.
Forsdick, who read languages at Oxford, said the situation was deeply worrying. Many university language departments have closed.
He can remember aged 18 going to a little village in Brittany as a language assistant in a gap year before university and trying to ask for stamps to send a post card home.
Now the words “Je voudrais acheter des timbres pour envoyer une carte postale en Angleterre” trip off his tongue but back then it was hard to make himself understood because he did not pronounce it properly. But the excitement, he added, was “that if you persevere, after a while those experiences become just a bad memory”.
Because Google translate or open AI can translate for most practical purposes?
>Experts warn that teenagers, especially boys who are much less likely to study a language at A-level than girls, risk becoming “little Englanders”, who do not know the basics of how to communicate in France, Germany, or any country where English is not spoken.
How often do British people need to communicate in France/Germany etc? And when they do how often is their basic [language] superseded by a local speaking client English? I did A level German/still speak conversational German and half the time hotel staff or waiters will respond in English after I order something in German
It also assumes you go to an area where you speak the language. A German A level doesnt make it any easier to communicate in Portugal for example.
It’s also a matter of utility. Other than going to Germany I get very little benefit from speaking German. A German speaking English though gets access to most of the internet, Hollywood films, American music etc. There is a clear benefit to it
Because it’s hard. There’s no tricks to languages, it’s just learning.
I lived in Germany for about 8 months and it was mostly English spoken by German people. Finding German people who wanted to speak German wasn’t straightforward.
Schools are shit at teaching languages for the most part. Not sure what the choices are now but when i was in school the choices were non-existant and it was either just French or German so there was no option to pursue a language i had wanted to learn.
The only place I’ve ever had to use my GCSE German to be understood was an island in Turkey.
You would have to try hard to find a situation in DACH where no-one speaks English and nothing can be translated.
And I suspect the number of Germans learning Russian has plummeted since before 1990.
We star teaching languages far too late we should be doing it as soon as children start school
It’s taught very poorly, I can’t quite fathom how when I go to France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, nearly everyone I meet speaks English well enoyght to have a small talk conversation.
Modern languages are in freefall because the job market for languages graduates has been decimated.
I did my German A-Level in 2013, part of the article’s statistics, and I went on to major German at university and I graduated with a 2:1. I think I can speak German fluently, and when I do travel to Germany, I never really experience Germans switching to English for me.
But I have an unrelated 9-5 office job in the financial sector because no one is hiring language graduates. Private sector businesses are arrogant – they think machine translations are enough for contracts or legal documents. It’s not – regulators have fined audit and accountancy firms for the use of machine translations – this prompts the fined firms to them seek out freelance translators (who work pennies per word and have 0 job security).
Public sector is… well… the only well paying public sector jobs looking for language graduates are MI6 (hope you studied Russian, Chinese or Arabic) or the FCO looking for diplomatic staff (they’ve got a bad reputation for hiring from affluent backgrounds). That is, unless you take a teaching degree and subject yourself to fewer and fewer schools teaching languages, shit teaching pay (remember the strikes?), and then abuse from children over the language, which is xenophobic in nature. If I wanted to go into teaching, I’d be looking at a pay cut for several years just to end up potentially unemployable.
Given I hold a passport of an EU member state, I’ve been giving more and more consideration to just emigrating to Germany. It’s a better quality of life, and one of the reasons I studied and enjoyed German was because I really liked Germany… and still do.
Saw this in the Times today and also found it an interesting article, glad you posted it OP.
Most schools don’t have German as an option anymore. It used to be German and French, but now it’s often Spanish or Italian too. There’s also a shortage of German speakers in uk, so it just gets passed on
Because 1) translation apps and 2) English is the lingua franca for doing business across western Europe.
13 comments
Article contents:
*Sian Griffiths, Education Editor | Graphics by Venetia Menzies, August 12 2023, The Sunday Times*
When Katrin Sredzki-Seamer came to England from Germany in 1990 and later started teaching German at a secondary school, pupils could be quite negative. “Children would bring up Fawlty Towers and that episode, ‘Don’t mention the war’,” she recalled.
Despite the imitations of Basil Fawlty and the teasing, she said it was a golden age for language teaching. Until 2004 it was compulsory to study a foreign language, usually French or German, at GCSE.
Not any more. The study of both is in crisis.
Over the past ten years, the number of children in England sitting German A-level has almost halved from 3,999 in 2013. It had fallen to 2,646 last year, according to the Joint Council for Qualifications, and has dropped to just 2,186 this year. In 2003, 6,429 children sat the exam.
The fall in French A-level numbers is almost as grim, dropping from 10,249 in 2013 to 6,429 this year. The A-level results will be published on Thursday.
As fewer children learn languages there is a lack of qualified teachers. After the Brexit referendum in 2016, many French and German teachers that Sredzki-Seamer knew who were working in English schools and universities left Britain.
Experts warn that teenagers, especially boys who are much less likely to study a language at A-level than girls, risk becoming “little Englanders”, who do not know the basics of how to communicate in France, Germany, or any country where English is not spoken.
Next month French and Germans trained as language teachers are being offered a £10,000 relocation payment to come to English schools. It is part of an emergency recruitment drive by ministers to try to plug classroom vacancies.
As part of the same recruitment drive by the Department for Education, French and German citizens are being offered up to £27,000 to train as language teachers in England, in a scholarship scheme organised by the British Council.
“There are not enough homegrown teachers,” said Vicky Gough, an expert in foreign languages at the council. “We are recruiting German speakers from Germany and French speakers from France to train as teachers this year. We have 175 bursaries worth £27,000 each, then they can get a visa to come and study here and teach languages.”
Charles Forsdick, the James Barrow professor of French at Liverpool University, who will soon take up a chair at Cambridge, said: “England has a language education crisis: fewer people are studying languages at school and university language programmes are closing. We must ensure we get EU nationals back in language classrooms.”
The decline in GCSE entries is also dramatic. While many schools still insist that a child does at least one language at GCSE, many do not since the rules changed in 2004. The number sitting French GCSE has fallen from 165,127 in 2013 to 123,111 this year. In 2003, when children still had to sit at least one foreign language GCSE, 308,342 sat the exam.
Spanish is the only language that has more children sitting exams at GCSE and A-level but the rise is overshadowed by the far bigger fall in French and German. The number taking A-level Spanish is up 7.2 per cent since 2013, but the number taking German is down 45.3 per cent over the same period.
The drop in children choosing languages for GCSE and A-levels is part of a wider trend as teenagers shun arts subjects such as English literature and drama in favour of maths and computer science, which are thought more likely to lead to a well-paid career.
Language learning, Gough said, risked becoming the preserve of “middle-class girls.”
She added: “We did a survey a year ago that showed parents of boys are less likely than parents of girls to say to them learning languages is a good thing. So it becomes a trend that middle-class girls study languages. There are more entries at A-level and GCSE from girls. Boys doing languages is a real issue.”
While 7,671 children sat French A-level exams in 2021, only 2,194 were boys. With German, there were only 981 boys among the 2,507 children who took the exam.
Sredzki-Seamer, who directs a national programme to train language teachers directly in schools, said: “Boys think it is too hard. They get embarrassed. Teenagers also struggle with making a fool of themselves. It puts you on the spot having to speak out loud. That can be scary.”
School trips and exchanges have also collapsed, particularly since Covid, and foreign language assistants, who could enthuse children with talk of French or German music, films, gossip and political rows, have largely disappeared.
“When I was a pupil in east Germany I went on an exchange to Russia aged 14 and stayed with a Russian family,” said Sredzki-Seamer, who was head of German at a secondary school. “It was life changing. You are scared, you struggle to make yourself understood but you find your way and are proud of yourself afterwards.”
As a teacher of German she would also run school trips to Koblenz, where the Moselle meets the Rhine, and take children “to a wine cellar, nine-pin bowling or to an open-air swimming pool to experience the culture — then have coffee and cake”.
There would also be school trips to Normandy: “We would take them to a château and do Masterchef and a local market and visit some World War Two bunkers.”
Gough said the number of schools with links overseas had fallen since Brexit. Surveys showed that “11 per cent had no links then, now 36 per cent of state schools say they have no links. And children have to get visas to travel and teachers have heard about the delays at passport control.”
The importance of learning French or German was more vital than ever after Brexit, she said. “We need open-minded citizens who understand people do things differently in other countries. There is a risk of getting locked down in a little Englander mentality at a time when we are changing our role on the world stage and are no longer part of Europe. We need more people who can deal with, and understand ,people from other cultures, and being able to speak other languages is critical,” she said.
Forsdick, who read languages at Oxford, said the situation was deeply worrying. Many university language departments have closed.
He can remember aged 18 going to a little village in Brittany as a language assistant in a gap year before university and trying to ask for stamps to send a post card home.
Now the words “Je voudrais acheter des timbres pour envoyer une carte postale en Angleterre” trip off his tongue but back then it was hard to make himself understood because he did not pronounce it properly. But the excitement, he added, was “that if you persevere, after a while those experiences become just a bad memory”.
Because Google translate or open AI can translate for most practical purposes?
>Experts warn that teenagers, especially boys who are much less likely to study a language at A-level than girls, risk becoming “little Englanders”, who do not know the basics of how to communicate in France, Germany, or any country where English is not spoken.
How often do British people need to communicate in France/Germany etc? And when they do how often is their basic [language] superseded by a local speaking client English? I did A level German/still speak conversational German and half the time hotel staff or waiters will respond in English after I order something in German
It also assumes you go to an area where you speak the language. A German A level doesnt make it any easier to communicate in Portugal for example.
It’s also a matter of utility. Other than going to Germany I get very little benefit from speaking German. A German speaking English though gets access to most of the internet, Hollywood films, American music etc. There is a clear benefit to it
Because it’s hard. There’s no tricks to languages, it’s just learning.
I lived in Germany for about 8 months and it was mostly English spoken by German people. Finding German people who wanted to speak German wasn’t straightforward.
Schools are shit at teaching languages for the most part. Not sure what the choices are now but when i was in school the choices were non-existant and it was either just French or German so there was no option to pursue a language i had wanted to learn.
The only place I’ve ever had to use my GCSE German to be understood was an island in Turkey.
You would have to try hard to find a situation in DACH where no-one speaks English and nothing can be translated.
And I suspect the number of Germans learning Russian has plummeted since before 1990.
We star teaching languages far too late we should be doing it as soon as children start school
It’s taught very poorly, I can’t quite fathom how when I go to France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, nearly everyone I meet speaks English well enoyght to have a small talk conversation.
Modern languages are in freefall because the job market for languages graduates has been decimated.
I did my German A-Level in 2013, part of the article’s statistics, and I went on to major German at university and I graduated with a 2:1. I think I can speak German fluently, and when I do travel to Germany, I never really experience Germans switching to English for me.
But I have an unrelated 9-5 office job in the financial sector because no one is hiring language graduates. Private sector businesses are arrogant – they think machine translations are enough for contracts or legal documents. It’s not – regulators have fined audit and accountancy firms for the use of machine translations – this prompts the fined firms to them seek out freelance translators (who work pennies per word and have 0 job security).
Public sector is… well… the only well paying public sector jobs looking for language graduates are MI6 (hope you studied Russian, Chinese or Arabic) or the FCO looking for diplomatic staff (they’ve got a bad reputation for hiring from affluent backgrounds). That is, unless you take a teaching degree and subject yourself to fewer and fewer schools teaching languages, shit teaching pay (remember the strikes?), and then abuse from children over the language, which is xenophobic in nature. If I wanted to go into teaching, I’d be looking at a pay cut for several years just to end up potentially unemployable.
Given I hold a passport of an EU member state, I’ve been giving more and more consideration to just emigrating to Germany. It’s a better quality of life, and one of the reasons I studied and enjoyed German was because I really liked Germany… and still do.
Saw this in the Times today and also found it an interesting article, glad you posted it OP.
Most schools don’t have German as an option anymore. It used to be German and French, but now it’s often Spanish or Italian too. There’s also a shortage of German speakers in uk, so it just gets passed on
Because 1) translation apps and 2) English is the lingua franca for doing business across western Europe.