Ofsted has a very narrow view of what counts as a broad and balanced curriculum. We need more GCSEs to combat this. How about we start with comparative languages?
I have had the honour of visiting many schools up and down the country in the last few months. One of the common features of these visits is the challenge I’m hearing about facing modern foreign language teachers: how to engage young people in languages? In South-East Cambridgeshire: “The children here aren’t interested in French”. In Gloucestershire: “We had such resistance when we made a language compulsory for the highest attainers, now we’re just sending a strongly-worded letter to suggest they choose it.” In Lincolnshire: “We don’t make all students do two languages now, it was better to let them drop it.”
It has reminded me of a conversation I once had with a group of Year 9 students who didn’t want to leave the lab to go on to their French lesson. Even physics was better than French. They didn’t see the point of French. I asked what they knew about France. One of the group said he wouldn’t even be able to get there if he wanted to. This was a child from a farming family, and in that moment I understood just how far away France was for him. A really faraway land.
It goes without saying (but I have to say it, because humans so easily misunderstand others’ arguments) that there are many, many wonderful benefits to learning a modern foreign language. But there are many benefits to learning just about anything. And there is so much in this rich and wonderful world to learn. So it is very, very important, when we’re arguing about the benefits of learning X, that we compare those to the benefits of learning all the other things you could learn instead. And in the case of selecting one or two modern foreign languages, it’s not clear that many children do get these benefits, because they don’t engage (and at least one and a half million British children already speak a language anyway). When you’re arguing that it is good to learn French, you are undoubtedly thinking of a particular kind of learner. Not the child from a farming family without a passport who hasn’t even been to the city ten miles away from home, let alone France.
You say: it would be wrong to take French away from this child, even at his own request… it is too important, we have to wedge the door open, to allow him to get the benefits of learning French despite himself. It will help widen his horizons, you think. You are wrong, because his horizons are not set by the textbooks in the classroom. You are wrong, because you don’t get where he is coming from. You don’t get it at all.
You see, French is part of a middle-class curriculum. It was the language of royalty and the upper classes for centuries after the Norman invasion before it was taken up as the foreign language of choice by Victorian educationalists. The fact that it remains as England’s primary foreign language in the 21st century is merely a historic hangover in a stinking, stagnant curriculum: a more responsive curriculum would have been slowly overturning French in the last 40 years with Arabic, Mandarin and Portuguese. We don’t do so because we don’t have the same connections to these languages as French, German and Spanish. Middle-class connections.
Some children don’t get climb the Eiffel tower, and don’t have daft conversations with their Dad half in French. They don’t label all the packets in the kitchen with French words with their Mum and they don’t go see the Monets at the Fitzwilliam Museum. There’s no French dictionary within easy reach and Grandad doesn’t spend Sunday mornings listening to a Rosetta Stone CD in the big armchair. They haven’t held a bowl of handmade mayonnaise above their heads and when they’ve been eating croissants, no-one has commented on the similarity between ‘croissant’ and ‘crescent’.
Provisos: none of these things to do are important or vital or better things to do than any other things; not all middle-class families do things like my mad family; and yes, loads of working class kids have of course climbed the Eiffel Tower (in fact, mine haven’t… yet).
The point is that it is hard to engage kids in French lessons if France and French culture are faraway lands for them. If you think we are obliged to try, you are prioritising a particular kind of cultural capital above others. You are making the kid more middle-class to suit a middle-class curriculum, instead of making the curriculum suit the cultural capital of the children it is supposed to serve. It is patronising to say it is better to study French than farming and agriculture, economics and politics, media studies, journalism, law and geology, but this is precisely what our national curriculum says.
Ofsted are clear that its inspectors are now looking for a broad and balanced curriculum. Their notion of a broad and balanced curriculum is largely based, however, upon the English baccalaureate. Children should learn a very strict set of subjects in order to demonstrate their breadth. Recently, Ofsted refused to give a school an outstanding rating because they didn’t find enough breadth and balance in Year 9. At the time they made the assessment, the students at this school had 52 choices of what to study on a Wednesday afternoons, including Anglo-Saxon history, fencing, philosophy, creative writing and Russian. But Ofsted were concerned that the children weren’t doing history and geography. They’d been allowed to choose debating, textiles or robot-making instead.
A language course would more closely fit children’s own cultural capital if they were able to explore a number of languages that were of interest to them. That group of Year 9 boys who didn’t want to go to French included one student who spoke Lithuanian at home. What if his friends were able to address this family with a few phrases of Lithuanian? Would they be interested in comparing these phrases in many languages? They could make a basic start in French, German and Spanish too, but the purpose would be to explore and understand the basic structures and evolution of language. Students from ethnic minorities with languages other than English could share their linguistic and cultural experiences. There would be a little etymology, study of ongoing changes to word usage, modern rap, poetry, a little about the impact of war and invasion on language, and most certainly some learning about different cultures.
It was when I found myself covering for a Spanish class on a hot summer day that I understood why there was a department in the school-just the one-that had a bigger teacher retention problem than science. We can try to make modern foreign languages relevant, of course. There are many teachers who do a brilliant job of it, of course. But look at the bigger picture: we don’t need to force it as much as we do. Look at the negative impact on children’s view of school and learning. Respect other subjects and other cultural capital: learning French is great, but so is learning Somali, Polish, Lithuanian, Russian and Punjabi.
The promotion of the English baccalaureate by the Coalition Government was supposed to encourage languages, but it has had the opposite effect. That’s because the English baccalaureate is largely a project of pushing one person’s cultural capital upon another. Learning French is great, but not for everyone.