Blog: Proposal to Teach Foreign Languages from Age Five

4th October 2011

Education Secretary, Michael Gove, has proposed that all children over five should be taught a foreign language in UK schools and is even encouraging longer school days, in order to make this happen.

The Guardian reported him commenting that, “Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign languages and that we just need to speak louder in English. It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning.”

He also stated that in almost every other advanced country, children learn a language from the age of five and that Britain should set itself the same ambitious target, and added that “learning a language and the culture that goes with it, is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children.”

It remains to be seen whether the Tories will U-turn on this or simply forget about it or sell it off; but at this stage it sounds like the penny may have dropped – at least in the Education Secretary’s mind.