I like to think of myself as an educated person. Yet the brutal truth is that by the standard that has prevailed for about 1,500 years I’m not. This might strike regular readers of this column as a statement of the obvious, but for me it is a matter of embarrassment. I am intellectually incomplete because I cannot speak, let alone master, a foreign language.

Charles V, when Holy Roman Emperor, asserted that he talked in: “Spanish to God, French to men, Italian to women and German to my horse.” I do not have a horse, merely a cat, and English is the limit of my conversations with her. And if the Almighty really does business in Spanish, then my already meagre prospects of talking my way through the Pearly Gates will be rendered entirely incredible.

Although this is essentially my fault, I have a modest institutional alibi to cite.

At my comprehensive in the late 1970s it was not compulsory to study a foreign language at O level or CSE and there was no national curriculum to force the school to operate differently. Languages were hard work and did not appear to be my natural aptitude. I did not enjoy science very much, either, although I was better at it.

So I did what I believed I would do well at and accumulated quite a collection of O-levels in what were somewhat similar subjects. I have (separately) an O level in accounts and commerce and economics, one in the British constitution, government and politics and sociology, geography and meteorology (yes, an O level in weather) but none in biology, chemistry or physics. And, initially, I didn’t have one in a foreign language, either.

I then found that if I wanted to apply for and be admitted to Oxford University I had to acquire a language O level to satisy its academic standards. I managed, in a triumph more of memory than anything else, to crash-course my way to a C in French, despite a thoroughly deserved U in the oral examination. Then, as now, my efforts at spoken French are a harsher insult to that country than its having been invaded three times in 70 years by Germany.

This sort of experience was supposed to have been rendered unrepeatable by the education reforms of the 1980s. Alas, it has not. On Friday Cambridge University announced that it is proposing to abandon its requirement that all who wish to be admitted must have secured a GCSE in a modern language.

It intends to do this because otherwise it will be impossible to attract more bright pupils from state schools. The numbers sitting for a GCSE in a language have collapsed since the Government declared in 2004 that it would no longer be an obligation to do so. Less than half of students took any GCSE language last year and fewer than one in five state schools demands that a language is studied until the age of 16.

Whatever else might be insisted upon, there was one reason and one reason alone why attempting a GCSE in a language was made voluntary. The Government measures success or failure in secondary education by the proportion of all pupils who emerge with five or more good passes at the GSCE examination. The pass rate for languages, which are often a challenge, was lower than that for maths, English and science.

To abandon the stricture to follow a language would allow students to adopt another subject instead – one that they might do better at. At the same time it would increase the success rate at GCSE in, for example, French, because only the most enthusiastic, and ablest, would choose to attempt it.

If that were the right objective, then I have to concede that the shift in approach has been successful. In every other respect it has been an unmitigated disaster. It has meant that at a time of globalisation and interdependency – when the advantages of speaking foreign languages have never been greater – the percentage of children in Britain who can do so is falling dramatically.

At a moment when Whitehall contends that Britain should be more deeply involved in the European Union, we are deliberately rendering ourselves less capable of communicating with our neighbours. Furthermore, since a language is a key to understanding other cultures, we risk becoming more ignorant about them.

All this is bad enough, but there is worse. For what is occurring is a reversion to an old class divide between an elite and the masses. Modern languages are not being snuffed out in private schools, grammar schools or in the most impressive comprehensives. Their pupils are part of the less than half who will attempt a GCSE in a language this summer.

It is the mainstream comprehensive where taking a language after the age of 14 is becoming a rarity and hence it is less likely one will be studied seriously before that age. A Labour Government, almost incredibly, has presided over this catastrophe.

The response of ministers is to protest that more emphasis will be placed on language teaching in primary schools from 2010 and to proclaim that “a one-size-fits-all approach to compulsory language GCSE study simply does not motivate pupils”. Yet what is proposed in primary schools is essentially a feeble sop. In any case, why a “one-size-fits-all” strategy is considered legitimate for maths and English but not French and Spanish is a mystery.

There is almost no time left in which to save ourselves from this folly. If it is not reversed imminently then there could be too few language teachers in state schools to cope with a return to compulsion. It is a tragedy that Cambridge University has had to conclude that there are so many otherwise intelligent young people out there who do not have a GCSE in a language that they must amend their rulebook.

It is, as I can testify, even more of a tragedy for those individuals themselves. You do not achieve much abroad with an O level in meteorology.

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