Education Bill

My noble friend Lady Coussins, who is attending her daughter’s graduation today, asked me to say a couple of words on Amendment 121, to which I wish to add my support. The late, lamented Lord Dearing picked up very strongly in his languages review that we are not monitoring the catastrophe that has happened to the learning of modern foreign languages in the wake of what many of us regard as the largest single piece of inadvertent educational vandalism in the past decade—the removal of the GCSE language requirement. Since then in state comprehensive schools the proportion of pupils still studying a language between the ages of 14 and 16 has halved from 80 to 40 per cent. As ever, it is the children in the less ambitious schools who are being deprived in every possible way, including being deprived of certain future employment opportunities. I hope we could at least start monitoring it.