Shadow Education Secretary, Stephen Twigg, has backed the government’s introduction of the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) which recognises students who achieve a GCSE C-grade or better in English, maths, history or geography, sciences and a language.
Twigg praised the measure, which he believed would reduce the decline in language study. In an interview with the Guardian, he said: "The EBacc has one clear positive: more children carrying on to languages at 16. Let’s be frank, the government has achieved something there and I welcome that." He added: "I think the mistake we made was to do it the wrong way around. I would definitely make languages optional at 14, but what we should have done is had the primary languages approach first and then made the changes at 14. You can’t go back to making it compulsory."
Since languages were made optional for 14 year olds in 2004, language study has seen a significant drop. This year there were just 154,000 entries for GCSE French, compared with more than 300,000 in 2004.
For more information, visit the Guardian website and the Department for Education website.