Scotland has abolished school exams in Russian - what can we do?

[Jenny Carr]

Dear SEELANGers
We have just found out that the Scottish school exam board, the SQA (www.sqa.org.uk), has carried out its threat to abolish national exams in Russian - this means Highers, Intermediate and Access grades.  (They will still offer the "Languages for Work" qualification but that is not the same thing and so far there have been no candidates for that - so it is no compensation and just a red herring).
This is extremely bad news.  
- If there are no exams no school will think of offering the language (apart from a very small number of private schools which can offer the English GCSE/A Levels)
- If Russian is not offered alongside other "mainstream" languages like French, German, Spanish and (a new addition) Mandarin it will not be considered by pupils/staff/the wider community to be of any importance - whether as a language to study at university or as a culture.  
- Russian is the only Slavonic language with a realistic chance of getting (back) into the mainstream, and is an important representative of that group of languages.  It cannot be pedagogically sensible for schools to offer pupils only a clutch of languages from only one group (French, Spanish, Italian) - even German is struggling to keep a toehold.
We were very grateful for the help of people on this list when I first raised the issue (in September?) - several wrote to the SQA chief executive and/or contributed comments to our webpage http://www.scotlandrussiaforum.org/keepschoolexams.html.
We need to keep trying!

Please send me suggestions of what to do next - and we'll investigate options ourselves.

Thank you for your support.  I realise Scotland is a little country far away to most of you - but we used to have a wonderful reputation for education, not least in foreign languages, and would be grateful if the Russian academic community would help us in our attempt to stop a language of major importance like Russian slipping away unnoticed.  
Best wishes
Jenny Carr
Scotland-Russia Forum - www.scotlandrussiaforum.org  

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