FOREIGN languages are in danger of disappearing from state schools, new government-commissioned research has found.

Only 3 per cent of England’s 17,000 primary schools are providing a single 20-minute lesson a week for pupils aged 7 to 11.

A quarter of schools that have introduced and then abandoned language lessons blamed a lack of time in the curriculum. Most of the schools surveyed were in areas where children came from well-off family backgrounds.

The research suggests that the Government will find it difficult to meet its declared aim of ensuring that all pupils are offered language lessons by 2009.

In addition, the Secondary Heads’ Association (SHA) has given warning that entries for language GCSEs are in rapid decline after Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, ended a requirement for students to take a language after the age of 14. Mr Clarke has set out a national languages strategy, in which all children will be entitled to study at least one European language from age 7 by the end of the decade. But in September he abolished the requirement for students to study a language for GCSE, arguing that compulsion “will not keep language learning alive”.

A study commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) showed that while 44 per cent of schools offered “some form” of language teaching, virtually no primary schools were meeting the Government’s target for modern foreign languages.

The researchers concluded that the Government’s promised entitlement was “starting from a low baseline”.

They also highlighted the low level of qualifications of many teachers. The most common qualification was a GCSE in French, held by a quarter of primary teachers. French was also the most common language offered in schools, with only 8 per cent offering an alternative.

Only two of 133 local education authorities questioned in the DfES study estimated that more than 80 per cent of their schools offered foreign languages. Forty councils said that fewer than 20 per cent of their schools provided classes.

It concluded that “substantial funding is needed to extend the scale and quality of current provision”. But the DfES is committed to spending only £10 million next year on the languages strategy.

John Dunford, general secretary of the SHA, urged Mr Clarke to order an urgent review of the decision to drop the requirement for languages after 14. He said: “The numbers in secondary schools doing modern languages at 14 and 15 is falling dramatically.

“This is leading to a reduction in the number of language teachers and once you lose the teachers it will be very difficult to put languages back in the curriculum. I think the Government has to review this policy as a matter of urgency. It has greatly overestimated the amount of language tuition in primary schools by including pupils attending lunchtime clubs or after-school clubs.”

David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said that primary schools were “light years away” from meeting the Government’s target.

“It is not for lack of willingness. Every primary school in the country would dearly love to be able to deliver foreign languages, but we are very short of teachers who can do it,” he said.

“The pressure on primary schools to deliver in the wake of the abandonment of languages post-14 in secondary schools, has to be matched by much better resources and a coherent drive by Government to help schools meet its target.”

He added: “There is a yawning gap between the state and independent sectors on this. The debate in the independent sector is not whether languages can be taught, but whether they should be moving from French and German to Spanish and Chinese.”

The GCSE results this summer showed that the number of students who took French fell by 13,000, or 3.9 per cent, to 318,095, after a drop of 7,000 last year. Entries for German declined by 3,600, or 2.9 per cent, to 122,023, but the number of candidates taking Spanish rose by 4.5 per cent, or more than 2,700, to 64,078.

The Education Secretary introduced the strategy in December 2002, and has not ruled out compulsion if primaries fail to develop provision.

Foreign languages are compulsory in most European primary schools, where lessons usually begin between the ages of 8 and 11. By the time that pupils are 10, between 6 and 15 per cent of the teaching week is devoted to foreign languages. France starts language lessons at age 5, Luxembourg, Norway and Austria at 6. Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Cyprus and Latvia make English the first compulsory foreign language in primary schools.

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