As private schools grasp the tiger’s tail and teach their children how to conduct business in Chinese, fears are growing that state pupils will be left behind as their schools are allowed to duck out of teaching languages altogether.

Richard Cairns, the first independent school head to make Mandarin compulsory for all new students, fears the government’s decision to make foreign languages optional in the national curriculum two years ago is leading to a two-tier system, where private school children will thrive in the new Asian-led world markets, but state pupils will be left to flounder without even the basics of schoolboy French.

“The state’s reluctance to champion language teaching to GCSE is impoverishing a generation of young people and reinforcing the small-minded ‘little Englander’ mentality that is prevalent in our society,” warned Cairns, head at Brighton College, last week.

His forebodings have been confirmed by new statistics that show three-quarters of students in a third of state schools have dropped foreign languages by the time they are 15.

One school has stopped teaching languages to 14-16-year-olds altogether, and German, for so long the second main language taught in British schools, after French, is now in possibly terminal decline. Last month Alan Johnson, the education secretary, announced a review of the government’s decision to stop making the study of languages compulsory after the age of 14.

“If the government was really serious about modern languages it would make sure there were enough language teachers around,” said Cairns, who believes the state of modern languages echoes the crisis in science teaching, which has left university science departments closing because of a lack of students. “It’s the same fiasco they had with science — there aren’t enough physics teachers, so they create an A-level in science that doesn’t need a physics teacher.”

Cairns is not expecting his students to become fluent in Chinese, or even to get a formal qualification in it — the vast majority of pupils taking GCSE Mandarin in Britain are native speakers. But he thinks that even a basic knowledge will give his pupils an edge.

“We all know what a difference it makes if you can show that you know even just a few words of a difficult language — eyes light up and doors open. I just want to make that possible for our children.”

So seven weeks into their studies how are new pupils at Brighton College’s senior school, which takes children from 13, coping with a language that has no simple, exact equivalent for “yes” or “no”? “It’s very different from learning French or Spanish,” said Eleanor Barnett. “So far I can greet people, which is ‘Ni hao’ (an approximation to hello), and say, ‘Wo shi Eleanor’ (My name is Eleanor).

“It’s great to be learning a language that so many people speak because it gives you an insight into how their minds work,” she said. “Each word means something different depending on your inflections. For example, ‘ma’ can mean four different things: horse, or paralysed or mother or to scold, just by the different tone of your voice.”

Her classmate Sorcha O’Sullivan tried to explain how to turn a singular pronoun into a plural. “You just put ‘men’ on the end, so ‘wo’ means ‘I’ but ‘women’ means ‘we’,” she said, leaving me floundering before she had even begun explaining the basics of verbs.

Sorcha has even managed to understand some Chinese in the real world. “I was in a Chinese restaurant with my dad and I overheard someone using a tone of ‘ma’ that I understood — it was someone talking about their mum and I thought, ‘Wow, that is so cool’.”

Luke Redstone, 13, has mastered 10 Chinese characters, each of which gives him a potential vocabulary of at least four words, depending on how they are put together. He used to live in Asia and remembers hearing both Cantonese and Mandarin spoken and feeling that it sounded completely impenetrable. “I’m looking forward to going back and being able to pick out a few words,” he said. “I think I’ll feel a lot more confident about it.”

Their teacher Sarah Williams, an American who took up Chinese at 18, is amazed at her students’ progress. “The first students I taught began between the ages of 11 and 13 and they are now working in China,” she said.

It was not so much the ability to speak fluently which counted, as the willingness to try, she added. “You should see people’s faces when a non-Chinese face’s mouth opens and Chinese words come out.”