Business groups and language experts are calling on ministers to make linguistic skills a core part of vocational training, after research found young people are unable to study languages at large numbers of further education colleges.
A report by the British Academy published on Monday, shows that despite the importance of linguistic skills in many jobs, the ability to learn French, German or Spanish, let alone less common languages, has become a postcode lottery.
Researchers at Queen’s University Belfast analysed all 204 further education colleges (FE) in the UK, excluding sixth-form colleges. They found barely half offered some form of language teaching.
The picture is even worse in England, where only 70 out of 160 FE colleges taught a modern foreign language. . There is “next to no” language teaching throughout the north-east, north-west, east and south-west of England, the report finds. Out of 17 FE colleges in the east of England, only six offer any form of language learning.
