An initiative to support the teaching of foreign languages in schools has been quietly axed by ministers despite the Scottish Government praising its work.
The withdrawal of the programme was buried in the detail of budget documents published last month which have come under renewed scrutiny in the wake of other funding reductions which have recently emerged.
The papers reveal that funding for the 1+2 languages learning policy was in fact withdrawn for the financial year 2023/24 and will not be replaced in the coming financial year.
Introduced in 2013, the scheme was designed to try to encourage the uptake of languages in primary schools in a bid to ensure that every child can learn one modern language. Additionally, under the scheme each child was entitled to learn a second language from primary 5 onwards.
But the budget documents reveal that while £1.2m was spent on the initiative in 2022/3, no funding was given to it in this year or will be next year.
The Scottish Government told The Herald that it had been the intention to end the scheme in 2021, but funding continued to 2022/23 as a result of Covid. A spokesperson added that language learning had now becomee 'normalised' in primary and secondary schools from primary one to S3 and language teaching was financially supported in other ways.
However, figures suggest a significant drop over the last decade in pupils taking French and German at Higher level.
