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A new Centre of Excellence for England

The government has just announced it will invest nearly £15 million in a new ‘centre of excellence’ for languages, with a larger number of hub schools than the current NCELP arrangement. The details are here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/millions-invested-in-language-lessons

With just two years left of this dysfunctional government and a likely new Labour government, one wonders how far this initiative will get. But a key point to note that the new body, whether it be run by a “trust, university or business” will have to be aligned with the principles of the flawed TSC Review (Bauckham, 2016). This means sticking with the three ‘pillars’ of phonics, vocabulary and grammar, and a very explicit approach to language teaching. The new contract may be awarded again to the team at York University under Emma Marsden and Rachel Hawkes. They have already put in a mass of work on research and lessons.

More broadly, it’s hard to see how a centre of excellence with a small number of hub schools will make a difference to the goal of raising uptake in MFL at Key Stage 4 in England. We do not know if  NCELP has made a difference in this regard, but it seems unlikely. In any case, NCELP has not had sufficient time to really make a mark and demonstrate the results of its approach. The latest Language Trends report suggested more schools were taking up an EPI-inspired approach than the one proposed by NCELP. Most schools, of course, continue to use a hybrid approach of text book, plus in house resources, including resources such as sentence builders, knowledge organisers and grammar worksheets. Where KS4 take-up is high this is likely to be owing to high quality teaching, good behaviour systems, sensible timetabling, good departmental organisation, good resourcing and SLT support. Ofsted reports over the years have also pointed to a correlation between target language use and exam outcomes.

The sort of ‘pump priming’ provided by a centre of excellence, supported by fairly paltry investment, will not lead to fundamental change. In recent years, from my perspective, the Conti-inspired grassroots EPI revolution in pedagogy may have made the most difference to student motivation, but this has yet to be demonstrated through research and exam outcomes. That Language Trends survey I mentioned does indicate that EPI has gained a lot of traction though.

Of course, to seriously raise the status of MFL you would need to do a number of things: train more teachers, give these teachers a balanced knowledge of second language learning research and pedagogy, finally deal with the issue of severe grading at GCSE, create highly valued alternatives to GCSE and broaden the post-16 curriculum to allow more students to opt for languages at that level. In terms of pedagogy, we need to avoid falling into the trap of believing that the explicit teaching of words and grammar rules will improve matters. History tells us that this does not work for most pupils. 

The fundamental issues facing all anglophone nations will remain. English is the world's lingua franca, so motivating children, especially those from some socio-economic groups, to learn other languages will always be an uphill struggle.

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