Grace Clarke is chattering gaily on the phone, her conversation smattered with words that sound strange to me, but which seem to trip smoothly off her tongue. “ ‘Ni hao’ is ‘hello’ and if you want to say ‘goodbye’ it’s ‘zaijian’,” she informs me blithely. “It’s easy. It makes more sense than French. If you look at the characters, the one for ‘tomorrow’ is the sun and the moon put together. ‘A person’ is a triangle with no bottom and a triangle in a box is ‘a prisoner’. You can guess what they mean a lot of the time.”

Grace, 11, is a pupil at City of London, a top private girls’ school in the capital. Many girls in her year are grappling with Mandarin — riding the crest of a wave that is sweeping the study of China’s official language into schools up and down the country.

Across Britain FGS — French German and Spanish, the traditional trinity of school languages — is being supplanted by a new acronym, HAM — Hindi, Arabic and Mandarin, considered the languages aspiring entrepreneurs will need to do business with the emerging economic giants of the 21st century.

There are 300 state schools already teaching Mandarin and goodness knows how many private ones. Several have made it compulsory, including the fee-paying Brighton college — where even three-year-olds get classes in Chinese — Kingsford community state school in east London and Oxford high school. The last is building two sister schools in Shanghai — one of which is a campus complete with mini Oxford colleges. Felicity Lusk, the head teacher, is planning exchange visits for her Oxford girls.

From being an exotic rarity a few years ago, every other family you now speak to has a child starting the subject. It’s a revolution in our curriculum, and last week a report for the government added to the momentum by suggesting Mandarin should be an option for all seven-year-olds.

But if you are a parent is it a welcome breakthrough? Oxford-based mother-of-five Sophie Bowers echoed the anxieties of many when she wrote to Chris Woodhead’s column on this page recently to ask whether her 14-year-old son should choose Latin or Mandarin at GCSE.

“My husband and I cannot agree,” wrote Bowers. “My husband who works in the City thinks the future is Chinese whilst I think Latin is very useful in the learning of any European language. Moreover my son’s year will be the first to do Mandarin, which I am told is very hard.”

Being “good” at Chinese is tricky for those brought up in the West. Students have to master at least 4,000 characters — a massive, unfamiliar alphabet — to be able to read a newspaper or have a chat. Only a handful of colleges here are training teachers. The Mandarin teacher in Bowers’s son’s school is a Chinese-speaker who has switched from teaching maths.

“Oxford is a very academic place but I don’t know a single person in the city who has taken Mandarin GCSE . . . It’s not for the faint hearted,” she says.

Before making a final decision Bowers wanted to know how many nonChinese speakers scored highly in the exam. Although Edexcel, the only board that offers the qualification, does not keep figures on candidates’ ethnic backgrounds, its proportion of A* grades in Mandarin GCSE is an astonishing 91% — compared with 3% in maths or 11% in German — fuelling the suspicion that most of the 4,000 entrants are native speakers.

Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington college in Berkshire, says the situation is “a farce and a disgrace”. “The exam is far too easy for native speakers and far too difficult for nonnative ones. The exam board is being stubborn; they must make changes. Parents think the teaching of Mandarin is exciting. They are savvy people who can see the way the world is going. But once they realise their children will not do as well in the exam, that will be a disincentive.”

Some parents have already cottoned on. “What’s the point of studying Mandarin for five years, starting from scratch, if all she gets at the end is a D because it’s so difficult?” asks one father, whose 11-year-old daughter has just started classes.

It’s an issue worrying head teachers as well as parents, who are lobbying the boards to bring in a new easier test for British students.

“Depressingly”, says Martin Davidson of the British Council, who is leading the talks with Edexcel, opting for Mandarin GCSE right now is “a high-risk strategy”. Davidson has advised his youngest daughter, aged 15, to choose Spanish instead. If you are a highflying teenager, polluting a string of A grades with even a single C or D could put paid to a chance of a top university place.

“Despite being a Mandarin speaker myself I did not advise my own children, who were born in China, to take Mandarin GCSE,” he confirms. “They are more likely to be able to demonstrate that they have what is needed for a good university place if they take another language. The whole system needs to work together on Mandarin — exam boards, schools, teachers — and at the moment it isn’t.”

So what did Sophie Bowers’s son decide in the end? “He opted for Mandarin,” she says. “Whether that is a mistake I don’t know. The problem is we are in uncharted waters.”

Parents who want to look on the bright side might take comfort from knowing that at least they won’t be called on to help with homework.

“I think that’s one reason Grace is so keen on Mandarin,” says her mother, “because I can’t interfere. I haven’t got the faintest idea how she is getting on.”

Does it translate as good education?

We cannot teach our children French or Spanish. We cannot, let’s be honest, teach many of them to read and write English. But if Alan Johnson, the education secretary, is to be believed, thousands of them will soon be mastering the mysteries of Mandarin.

What planet does he inhabit? Does he have any idea how difficult this language is?

It will not happen, of course. Neither should it. Johnson’s enthusiasm for this big new idea stems from his need to distract attention from the fact that entries for GCSEs in modern foreign languages are collapsing, and his failure to understand that there is more to education than its contribution to Britain's economic competitiveness.

Mandarin matters, he says, because China is set to become such an important market. True, it is. But should such utilitarian concerns be the sole concern when it comes to deciding the languages our children study? Have we abandoned any belief that languages matter because cultures matter? That it is worth learning French to read Baudelaire and Rimbaud? That Latin and ancient Greek may be the most important of all?

Maybe I, too, live on Mars. Nobody these days seems to care about such “elitist” ideals.

Chris Woodhead

Times recommends

• Students abandon the drink for gyms and juice
• Ofsted: third of Baby P-style reviews inadequate
• Top boys' school picks first woman head