A further fall in the take-up of modern foreign languages will be revealed today when GCSE results are published, with the number of 16-year-old pupils taking French and German plunging below 300,000.

Teachers and business leaders also claimed that the “irrelevant” GCSEs were failing to give thousands of pupils the skills they needed for work and life.

Business groups say that it is a “national scandal” that so many pupils leave school unable to turn up to work on time or dress smartly and lacking good communication skills.

According to research by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which regulates exam standards, young people in their first jobs said that they were not even confident about answering the telephone to a stranger.

The criticism came as 600,000 teenagers were waiting nervously to receive their GCSE results.

The figures for languages are expected to show that entries for French will have more than halved since 2001, when there were more than 236,000 candidates.

Entries for German, which fell below 100,000 last year, are also expected to be in decline, leaving it in danger of becoming a minority subject.

Spanish entries, however, are expected to be up and there will also be an increase in community languages such as Urdu and Polish – largely because of the students who study their mother tongue at GCSE. Growing interest in emergence of China and India as global economic power-houses is also fuelling a growth in study of Mandarin and Urdu.

The figures will renew debate over the Government’s decision to stop making languages compulsory for children aged 14 to 16. Critics argue the decision has led to languages, which are increasingly regarded as important in the workplace, becoming an elitist subject.

The Government has tried to reverse the decline by ordering a review of language teaching headed by Lord Dearing, the former Post Office chairman and author of the 1998 Dearing Report into Higher Education, which last autumn recommended that languages become compulsory at primary school from the age of seven.

Teresa Tinsley of CILT, the National Centre for Languages, said that if there had been no increase in entries for mainstream languages by next year, the Government should consider making them compulsory at GCSE again.

“The key thing is to get motivation right – this is crucial in language teaching. Teaching languages at primary schools is very important in this respect. The latest figures show that 70 per cent of primary schools are either doing a language or planning to do one from September,” she said.

The Federation of Small Businesses said that one in ten of its members was concerned about basic literacy and numeracy problems among school-leavers and a poor grasp of life skills, such as communication and punctuality.

Colin Willman, its chairman, said: “Sadly, at the moment these skills are lacking in many 16-year-olds and this explains why more firms are turning instead to new migrants from other EU nations to fill their job vacancies.

“This threatens to leave more young people on the scrapheap if action is not taken urgently in the secondary school system.”

David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said it was a national scandal that so many school-leavers did not have an adequate grounding in the skills needed for work.

He called for schools to concentrate more on the skills that employers needed.

“Specialised diplomas geared towards providing a vocational and academic education would ensure school-leavers have the relevant qualifications and experience for the local jobs market,” he said.

Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, last night defended GCSEs, saying that the Government had made it a priority to raise standards in literacy and numeracy.

Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, congratulated pupils on their hard work, but said that GCSE exams were often a “waste of talent and time” because the national curriculum and assessment system was based on “shallow learning, rather than real understanding”.

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