Am I bovvered?

1 January 2006

"Am I bovvered?" It was scrawled over the face of the gangly teenage goth holding up the queue at Charles de Gaulle airport. As the temperature outside soared to 33 degrees, a harassed security officer pointed in desperation at the girl's incongruously hefty biker boots. "He wants you to take then off," I explained.

"Well," she huffed through funereal lips. "Why couldn't he just say so? If anyone else speaks to me in foreign today, I'll...."

The rest I missed, but the moment encapsulated perfectly the common misconception that wherever we travel we can expect linguistic deference simply because we are British, a belief that "everyone speaks English anyway."

Those of us who have been in education for more than a decade recall the euphoria of 1992. Markets deregulated, fuelling predictions that Europeans (and, like it or not, that included we Brits) would move freely between member states of our federation, perhaps living and working in several during a lifetime. Passports would be obsolete and borders blurred. Acquiring competency in languages other than English would be essential. Every school curriculum would include languages as a given.

So what went wrong? 

A survey conducted recently by Euro London Appointments (Times 2/8/06) revealed an alarming statistic. When 113 UK head offices of international companies were contacted and asked in French and German for their postal address and the name of the HR manager, only 2% of respondents could reply effectively. Most were confused, or hung up. When the same was done in Germany and France, 97% of respondents spoke excellent English. This is commercial suicide, but there is also a dangerous arrogance embedded in those figures, evidence of an entrenched insularity which nurtures contempt for communicating in anything other than our mother tongue. There lies the irony, of course, because ours is anything but a pure language, more a ragbag of nouns and verbs borrowed heavily from every nation who marched our way. On this page alone there are words lifted from the Indo-Europeans, Vikings, Celts, Romans, French, and from Britain's own wanderings abroad during the Empire.  We have become lazy linguists, absorbing from elsewhere when it suits, but unwilling to make that leap to meet our fellow Europeans in their terms, not just on ours. 

School must  play its part in breaking the mould, but analysis of this summer's results set alarm bells ringing: GCSE French entries dropped by 13%, and German is in danger of becoming a minority subject, the inevitable result of removing compulsory study of a modern foreign language from the GCSE years of our National Curriculum two years ago.

Undoubtedly that decision brought relief to the Headteachers of those schools where resources are stretched, and where they can now be employed to ensure pupils leave with at least the basic skills in literacy and numeracy. Perfectly understandable -  but is it right? I recall with affection a 24 hour trip to Paris in the late 80s with my set 5 from the inner-city comprehensive where I taught, in what was then known as a "social priority area". These were pupils for whom external examinations (then CSEs) would be too taxing, so we followed a system of "graded objectives". They had learnt how to ask in French for an ice cream, and to pay for it, which they all dutifully did, at a kiosk under the Eiffel Tower. They saw, and could name, all the tourist sites, and read the signs. In lessons uncluttered by examination requirements, they understood a little of French culture, its films and pop music, learnt some French history and geography, and we tasted French food. That too was education, though it was never assessed externally, and it influenced no-one's league table. Their brief trip to Paris dispelled my pupils' fear of "otherness", took off their xenophobic blinkers, the sort we Brits are prone to sport. Learning French was also great fun for them, and I like to think that when they recall their schooldays, set 5 will always have Paris.

Today, alas, schools operate in a system of data-driven inspections, and competitive league tables, where Heads are removed like football managers if they cannot produce quantitative evidence of continuous improvement. Students graded D and E in French in our current examinations will influence the school profile adversely, whatever the pedagogical benefits. The removal of that risk is purely pragmatic. Independent schools which educate around 7% of Britain's children, are unfettered by a centrally-imposed curriculum. They continue to promote the value of learning languages, some expanding their options to include Mandarin and those from Eastern Europe. Surely it would be an educational travesty of the highest order if the present decline in entries continued, making Modern Foreign Languages  available beyond Year 10 mainly to those in independent schools?  If the Dfes wishes to prevent a repeat of what happened to Classics, alive and well in the Independent sector but a rare find in maintained schools, then it must rethink its draconian decision of 2004. If it is the GCSE syllabus and assessment methods which are flawed, failing to inspire pupils, then it must look to imaginative alternatives. 

The message this government has given by removing language study from a National Curriculum is that learning to communicate with foreigners has no significant value: if those from beyond our shores want to talk, then they must be the ones to make the effort, not us. Dare we risk such a narrow perspective? This summer's events, at home and abroad, remind us that learning to embrace cultural and linguistic difference has never been more important. We have a duty to encourage the young to shed their patronising arrogance, to explore beyond the familiar. Wittgenstein's warning that "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world" carry even greater significance when that language is restricted to one's own.

Back in the queue at Charles de Gaulle, our young goth removed the offending boots, thrusting her bag unceremoniously at my husband behind her. A Belgian, fluent in five languages, he smiled. "Never mind," he said, "You'll soon be home."