to think this government hasn't got a clue about education- why should all children be made to take MFL at GCSE?

[LuluJakey1]

What is it with the ill-thought out education ideas this government has? Why should every child take a GCSE in MFL? It is not something many children enjoy or feel has relevance to them.

Why should a school not be able to be outstanding if it does not make all students take a GCSE in MFL?

My son attends special school. He can't talk and his understanding of his own language is limited to single regularly used words. He is only just beginning to communicate using symbols. I would not want his time wasted with other languages.
I used to teach mainstream secondary with children in yr11 who were nc level 2 and occasionally lower in maths. A course in other cultures with some language may have been appropriate for them but a standard gcse in a mfl (unless they wanted to do it) would not.

I am defining low ability children as those with significant learning difficulties would have been in special school in the past. Maybe you can narrow their curriculum so that it is nothing but maths and English, but you would make them pretty miserable in the process. I feel that making such children carry on with maths and English until 18 will not make a difference.

Ah, right. No, that's not what "lower ability" means in the context of a state school.

"Ah, right. No, that's not what "lower ability" means in the context of a state school."

Many MLD special schools have been closed and such children are now in mainstream state schools. Maybe I need to be more precise. I mean children who are unlikely to achieve level 3 (old national curriculum) by the end of year 11.

lambsie, lots of special schools have plenty of enrichment. For example taking severely disabled children to the zoo or a London museum. Not everything is the three Rs or preparing for the world of work. Children with severe learning difficulties need a bit of variety and excitment in their lives. I remember a class of children with learning difficulites being really excited to communicate with a special school in Austria via Skype. Neither group of children were ever going to be bilingual, but clearly they found it an exciting experience to wave at each other and say "hello" or "guten tag".

I'm all in favour of enrichment as long as the enrichment concerned is appropriate for the child.

Many MLD special schools have been closed and such children are now in mainstream state schools. Maybe I need to be more precise. I mean children who are unlikely to achieve level 3 (old national curriculum) by the end of year 11."

No- that's not what "lower ability" means in a state school, either!

My experience of lower ability DC in MS comprehensives as an adult working in MS is very different to when I was at school myself. There are hardly any SSs left for MLD so the bottom end of the academic ability curve is much more populated in MS. The government have made noises about DC with SN not to be included, but I haven't seen where they propose the cut off to be. My DS has a statement of SEN, soon to be transferred to an EHCP (hopefully) so they may just mean those DC with an EHCP, (currently about 2% of school age children have a statement.)

There are plenty of students who don't get their 5 A* to C, but an E, F or G grade is still a qualification, although not worth much. If DC with the best will in the world are likely to get an F or G grade in MFL but a D or C in a DT subject, that may have to be sacrificed to be timetabled, what good is that for the child?

"But if they're compulsory within a school then there will be pupils struggling away in a MFL exam when they could have sat one that they'd do well in."

But that's the case for everything isn't it. Even if it's a timetable issue eg if my son's school only offers one MFL at GCSE. Say my son would like to do two. Ends up having to do DT instead for example and gets a D or an E. Probably would have got an A or A* in a second MFL. It's the same with science, as I said further up, I had to do a science and got a B. Maybe if I'd done a second MFL I would have got an A. In the scheme of things it doesn't' really matter as I got enough, and good enough, grades overall to do the A levels and degree course I wanted. And that's what matters. If you do GCSE French and get a C, but you get As in the three subjects you want to do for A level does it matter? Or if you get an E but get the 4 subjects you need for a vocational college course - again does it matter?

It matters as far as you feel you have wasted your time doing a subject you don't like and maybe got detentions for not doing the homework because you felt it was a waste of time.

So in summary, I do see where people are coming from with this, but we already specialise too young compared with other countries and I do think we need a balanced curriculum to 16 and languages are important. And we need more flexible timetabling - so maybe if you can't do a subject you want to do at school and can do it at night school for example, the school allows you some free periods rather than making you do something you really have no interest in.

And maybe we need schools to work together so if you say have two schools close to each other and one offers German and French, and the other offers Spanish and Russian, pupils can do a course at the other school if they can't do the language they want at their own school.

No reason why low ability kids can't master a second language.

I teach low ability kids who are bilingual or even trilingual.

Makes no difference.

All British kids should learn a MFL. We are the ignoramuses of Europe in this area.

Geography and history are useless for many people. However education is more than just producing people who are employable.

Most of the posts in this thread arguing for mandatory MFLs are pointing out the employability benefits as the world becomes more multicultural and more and more jobs involve working with people from other countries. Arguments for mandatory MFL don't work when you consider other uses for the education system.

I think we need to be careful how we define low ability. We also need to be mindful that children's ability profiles can be spikey. It's rare to meet a child who really had no ability at anything, even in a special school. I am not referring to Autisic savants, but to the type of child who has lots of other qualities not measured by exams. Indeed a good school should nurture qualities like kindness, empathy and social skills. There are plenty of jobs that require good dexterity as well as academic skills.

The whole educational systems needs an overhaul, really, not just which subjects are mandatory for GCSEs. The only thing it really tests is how well a student does at exams, which says very little about their best skills and attributes.

Plenty of employers pay no attention to GCSE, A level or even degree grades because they haven't found a correlation between high academic performance and high work performance.

I think absolutely they should all learn a MFL

But you need good teachers to do so!

A couple of my de's secondary school teachers are so abominable it is enough to put you off learning a language. Some are great, but they keep leaving...

there is also a problem that learning a language for your typical English student means learning some grammar - some kids didn't learn any for a while so language is harder if you don't understand any of the parts of speech.

I feel we need to look at how we can cram more learning into the already over crowded curriculum. Would it be possible to teach subjects like Art or PE I French at primary. Could primaries recruit French speaking TAs, even if they don't have a degree in French. How can we up skill our primary school teachers language skills? Could we arrange an exchange for a British primary school teacher to work in a French school for a year and perhaps have a French primary school teacher come and work in an English Primary?

There certainly used to be eramus schemes for university students. Maybe we need it to be made easier for teachers or PE instructors to learn an MFL.

Camel,
We need primary school teachers to actually spend a year abroad and believe that they can become bilingual. Unless priamry school teachers have a good attitude to MFL they are never going to get anywhere.

I worked at a school which was part of the cornelius project. The EU funded a french speaking student to come and work in the school for a year. I don't know if that project still exists. I am sure that there would be french, german or spanish schools that would be interested in hosting a UK primary school teacher for a year (and even paying a salary).

Foreigners seem to have more of a can do attitude to language learning than the English. Look at all the bilingual immigrants in the UK.

They've had that bilingual approach in French schools for years. When I worked in a French school over 20 years ago I had to go to PE/ History-Geography/ Music and Art classes as well as English, and run part of the class through English working alongside the subject teacher.

True wrt the level of the teaching staff

I stopped going to my PGCE MFL classes because I was so disgusted with the standard of them.

Another girl and I both spoke the language.

The rest of the class didn't have a single word.

Nevertheless the lecturer persisted in trying to teach the mostly cloth eared trainees basics like numbers, colours etc so they could teach the language at primary level.

I was disgusted by how shite the whole thing was. If any of those people had taught my child at primary I'd have withdrawn him from the lessons. No accent, terrible pronunciation, no idea of how the language worked.

Dreadful. And MFL is now a requirement at primary. It's a joke.

There are children who can't speak and don't understand their own language. How can they master a second one? When people talk about all children and from what they are saying are not talking about all children without sen, it reads like they are not seeing some children as children/people.

that's true, but then my ds had a Polish boy come to the school in year 2 and by the time they were in year 4 his English was better than some of the kids in his class who were born and brought up here.

Formidable I simply don't see how you can make a MFL compulsory in primary until you have a cohort of primary teachers who have been taught a MFL in secondary. That's why I think it's an essential first step to make a MFL compulsory at secondary.

It should be open to schools to offer non-GCSE qualifications like DELF for French and DELE for spanish, which are explicitly linked to the European common framework for languages.

Lambsie there have always been some children exempt from the requirments of the full curriculum due to sen. That does not mean that the curriculum for the majority of children is wrong, just that there needs to be sufficient flexibility for the small % of children for whom it is unachievable.

Bur I take your point about wording.