Modern Foreign Language Teaching (Hansard, 17 November 2004)

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Skills (Lord Filkin)

Since the publication of the National Languages Strategy in December 2002, we have made much progress with promoting all modern foreign languages, not just French and German, in both primary and secondary schools.

Nineteen local education authorities have taken up key stage 2 language pathfinder roles to develop ways of delivering primary languages; we are consulting on a draft framework for the teaching and learning of languages at key stage 2; we have recently committed £5 million to support primary language learning in 2005–06; and by the end of this year will have trained well over 1,000 new teachers with a modern foreign language specialism.

The department has recently published research showing that the number of primary schools offering languages to their pupils has increased from 20 per cent in 2000 to 44 per cent in 2002–03. We intend to repeat this research in future years to monitor the 175WA extent of schools' take-up of foreign language learning and to gauge the progress towards our end-of-the-decade commitment that every pupil throughout key stage 2 will have the opportunity to study a language. Ofsted will continue to play a role in monitoring the quality of schools' language learning provision in the future.

A framework to support the teaching, planning and learning of modern foreign languages at key stage 3 was introduced into schools in 2003, and is already being used widely. A new voluntary assessment scheme to recognise and accredit individuals' language skills is currently being piloted in three languages and will be made available to all schools in eight languages from September 2005. We are also seeking to increase the range of vocational and academic options that are available to young people who wish to learn a language at key stage 4.