UK: 'Put Bengali on par with French' says Ofsted

[Harold Schiffman]

'Put Bengali on par with French' says Ofsted
By Lucy Cockcroft and Graham Tibbetts
Last Updated: 2:35am GMT 21/02/2008

Teachers should give languages such as Arabic, Bengali and Mandarin
the same priority as French, German and Spanish, government inspectors
announced yesterday.

Have your say: What languages should schools teach?

Ofsted, the education watchdog, said languages spoken by minority
communities in Britain must be given more prominence on school
timetables, bringing them into line with the major European languages.
 But teachers' leaders attacked the move as unrealistic and said there
were too few language teachers to make it work. Steve Sinnott, the
general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: "There is a
great gap between aspiration and reality. You can't just snap your
fingers and have enough highly skilled and qualified language teachers
in place. We already have a problem with that as it is, with primary
schools now looking to teach languages."

He said it would take four years to train a language teacher from
scratch.A spokesman for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority
(QCA) said that the policy was effectively in place already. Following
a review of the national curriculum, secondary schools are able to
treat all languages equally. "It's already happened. From this year
there is no distinction between the languages that schools want to
teach. If they want to teach a particular language they are free to do
so," he said. The announcement follows a Government review by Lord
Dearing last year, which said it would be crucial to teach more global
languages as China and India grew in economic influence.

Inspectors from the Office for Standards in Education, Children's
Services and Skills (Ofsted) also criticised the teacher training
system, warning that most "community language" teachers in England
were not properly qualified.Community languages are defined as those
with which many pupils have an affinity because of their ethnic
background - but may not be fluent in. A report from the watchdog said
few students were taking up places on the "limited" postgraduate
training courses in community languages. Ofsted said: "The majority of
community languages teachers surveyed did not have qualified teacher
status."Just over a quarter of them were qualified in the UK to teach
languages. Barely a fifth had a postgraduate certificate in education
in any subject."

Meanwhile, head teachers yesterday called for the grading of foreign
language GCSEs to be adjusted because they believe the exams are too
difficult. An inquiry last year found many teenagers were dropping
French and German at GCSE because the subjects were widely seen as too
hard. But the QCA rejected the demand to change the grading of
languages and called for better teaching instead.
The Association for Language Learning, the Association of School and
College Leaders (ASCL) and the Independent Schools' Modern Languages
Association criticised the QCA's decision.John Dunford, the ASCL
general secretary, said: "It is extremely disappointing that the QCA,
while recognising the problem, does not intend to bring the grading of
GCSE languages into line with mathematics, English and other similar
subjects."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/21/nedu121.xml

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