13th March 2019 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The number of students studying languages has dropped by half in some UK schools. Reported on the BBC, the number of students studying French GCSE and German GCSE have been affected the most, and in the poorest areas of England there have been drops of between 30% and 50% in the number of GCSE language entries since 2013. Many schools reported that the reason for the decline is the perception of the difficulty of language courses.
The trend is similar across the rest of the UK too, and many schools say that they have had to drop at least one language from their GCSE options. A college in St Helens said that they have completed removed A Level German from their curriculum because it is difficult to justify having such a small A Level class when their other classes all have 25 students.
While French and German have dropped significantly, there has been increase in other subjects like GCSE Spanish and GCSE Mandarin. The number of GCSE entries for other languages has increased from 2,500 to 9,400 in the last 16 years. However, this increase doesn’t nearly compensate for the overall drop off in language skills.
Businesses in the UK have called for the decline in languages to stop because of the effect it is having on our ability to work with other countries, particularly our closest neighbours, France and Germany. The introduction of baccalaureate type guidelines, to make GCSE students study a language, was supposed to put a halt to the decline in foreign language learning, but this hasn’t worked.