We’ve just had the latest batch of A-Level results in England, Wales and NI. It’s the familiar tale of small cohorts and high results, the latter caused by the former. Results day often provokes reflection, so here is mine! It’s about acknowledgement of failure and accountability. I’m getting political!
Over the last decade or so, modern foreign languages in England have been subjected to a succession of reviews, reports and curriculum initiatives.
We have had the Teaching Schools Council report on MFL pedagogy (Bauckham, 2016), the work of NCELP, the emphasis on the so-called three pillars of phonics, vocabulary and grammar, and the ALCAB review of A-level. More recently, these ideas have been embedded in curriculum and examination reform, with a strong emphasis on carefully specified vocabulary, phonics and grammatical knowledge.
Whatever one thinks of the thinking behind these reforms, it seems reasonable to ask a fairly basic question: have they worked?
If one important aim was to reverse the long-term decline in language learning, the evidence is hardly encouraging. GCSE language uptake has largely flatlined and may well fall further, while numbers taking languages at A-level remain historically very low. French and German in particular are a shadow of what they once were in the post-16 curriculum.
Of course, it would be simplistic to attribute this entirely to curriculum reform. Language uptake is affected by many factors: accountability measures, school option systems, perceptions of difficulty, grading, staffing, university requirements and wider attitudes towards language learning. Brexit and the increasingly dominant position of English internationally may also have played a part. But that does not mean curriculum and pedagogy should escape scrutiny.
The reforms of recent years have been associated with a distinctly traditionalist conception of language learning. The focus has been on systematic phonics, high-frequency vocabulary, explicit grammatical knowledge, carefully sequenced curricula and the mastery of linguistic components. There is much of value in all of these. Few language teachers would argue that pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar do not matter, but they should be in service to communication. The three pillars have become the organising principle rather than communication.
Languages are unusual school subjects. Pupils are not learning about something; they are learning to do something. They need to experience the satisfaction of understanding messages, expressing meanings, interacting with other people and discovering another culture through its language. The whole ‘knowledge curriculum’ movement may have done MFL a disservice. Knowledge of a language needs to be procedural, not declarative. Languages are predominantly learned implicitly - they’re picked up through use.
There is, however, an interesting counterpoint to this largely DfE-led story. Gianfranco Conti’s Extensive Processing Instruction (EPI) has grown into something of a grassroots movement among language teachers, largely outside official curriculum reform. The latest Language Trends survey (2026) highlighted its popularity in MFL departments. While retaining a focus on phonics, vocabulary and grammar, EPI places these within a much greater emphasis on comprehensible listening and reading, meaningful interaction, recycling and carefully scaffolded progression towards spontaneous communication. It has, in many classrooms, broken the mould of more traditional language teaching. Although we lack large-scale research evidence on its impact on subject uptake, there is considerable anecdotal evidence from schools using EPI of increased pupil confidence and motivation and, in some cases, improved continuation to GCSE and A-level. That experience deserves closer attention from researchers and policy-makers.
This is why I increasingly wonder whether the recent direction of MFL policy has led us down a traditionalist blind alley. We have become very good at discussing curriculum sequencing, frequency lists, sound-spelling correspondences and grammatical progression. Perhaps we have spent rather less time asking the question pupils themselves implicitly ask: Why would I want to carry on learning this language?
If a decade of reform has not produced a significant revival in language uptake, there ought at least to be some acknowledgement of that fact. Policy initiatives in education have a habit of being replaced by new initiatives without anyone looking back and asking whether the previous ones achieved their stated aims.
A serious review would not need to conclude that everything since 2016 was misguided. Indeed, I blogged at the time that there was much to like in the Bauckham report. The greater attention given to phonology, curriculum planning and vocabulary selection has brought useful insights. But a review might ask whether the balance has been wrong: whether linguistic knowledge has been privileged over communication, whether examination requirements encourage engaging language teaching, and whether sufficient attention has been paid to motivation, meaning, culture and successful interaction.
Perhaps the next phase of MFL reform should begin with the question:
What sort of language lessons make young people want to keep learning languages?
Until we take that question as seriously as phonics, vocabulary and grammar, I fear we may continue refining a curriculum which fewer and fewer pupils choose to study.
History shows that the pendulum swings in languages education between traditionalist and communicative approaches. Maybe the pendulum has swung too far in one direction.
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