The Guardian – Lucy Ward
“It’s summer term: season of exams, light evenings and – for many year 12s – university open days. With fashionable courses from psychology to sports science beckoning, how many applicants will resist their lure and choose those beleaguered Cinderella subjects, languages? On current trends, few. The story of the decline of modern languages in UK universities is as familiar as the fact that Madame Marsaud was always dans la cuisine in the textbooks: the numbers taking modern foreign language degree courses fell 16% between 2007-08 and 2013-14. The numbers stabilised last year, yet a new blow seems to land weekly: this month, the OCR exam board announced it is to discontinue GCSEs and A-levels in French, German and Spanish. The latest annual Language Trends report, meanwhile, found schools are not preparing for more GCSE or A-level language entries despite the new Ebacc – intended to see 90% of pupils take a suite of five core GCSEs including a language by 2020.”(more)