Credit: Drazen via Adobe Stock.

7 November 2024

By Ann-Marie Hunter, Elin Arfon, and Zhu Hua

Overview

One of the aims of the UK government’s current curriculum and assessment review is to ‘break down barriers to education’. Our research within the NCLE Language Hubs programme contributes to this discussion by exploring pupils’ access to languages.

We found that policy decisions made at the school level can significantly boost the uptake of languages at GCSE – but this can come at the expense of inclusion. We suggest that this tension is driven by accountability measures and other constraints that shape schools’ approaches, leading them to select pupils to study a language who have high achievement in other subjects like maths and English. We hope our research can contribute to positive action at the national and school level to address this concerning dynamic.

The value of languages

In the National Curriculum, languages are promoted as a way of fostering creativity and communication as well as supporting progression to further study and work. In 2010, modern and ancient languages like Spanish and Latin were included in the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), a performance measure for schools which relates to a core suite of subjects at Key Stage 4 (age 14–16) believed to keep young people’s options open for further study and future careers.

It has been suggested that studying these subjects may be linked to improved educational outcomes, including for pupils from poorer backgrounds, leading the previous government to argue that 90% of pupils should be entered for the EBacc. EBacc entry – the percentage of a school’s GCSE cohort entered for a GCSE in each of the EBacc subjects – is an official measure of school performance.

Despite this ‘light-touch’ policy steer from central government, languages continue to experience relatively low uptake, with just 45% of pupils taking a language GCSE in 2023. However, low rates of uptake are not universal, as languages are more commonly studied at GCSE level in independent and selective schools or by high-attaining or more advantaged pupils in non-selective state schools.

Language GCSEs: who decides?

Languages are mandatory at Key Stages 2 and 3, but only an optional or ‘entitlement area’ at Key Stage 4. Despite this, schools typically make their own decisions about languages at KS4, resulting in three distinct approaches:

1. Giving pupils free choice about whether or not to study a language at KS4.
2. Placing some pupils on a GCSE ‘EBacc pathway’ that includes a compulsory language.
3. Making languages a compulsory GCSE for all pupils (except pupils that may be exempted).

Much of the public discourse around the ‘language learning crisis’ in schools in England tends to focus on the reasons why pupils are no longer choosing to study languages. However, as shown in Figure 1, a large proportion of the 108 schools we surveyed reported that they made language GCSEs compulsory to some extent, either for all pupils or for a selected group who were chosen to study on an ‘EBacc pathway’ – 19% and 37% of schools respectively. Only 44% considered themselves to be ‘free choice’ schools.

Figure 1: prevalence of different policies relating to languages uptake at GCSE in surveyed schools. Credit: Hunter, Arfon and Zhu Hua.

Policies and pupil uptake

When we looked at the impact of these different policies on uptake figures we found a very strong association in the direction one might expect. Schools where a language GCSE was compulsory for all pupils had a very high mean uptake, at 87% of the cohort. This was significantly higher than those where a language GCSE was only compulsory for some pupils (50%), which was, in turn, significantly higher than schools that gave all pupils free choice (29%) (Figure 2). There was only one example of a school that operated a free choice policy and achieved over 55% uptake, and this was a selective grammar school. This statistically significant difference underscores the significant role of school policy in shaping languages uptake, with implications for any initiatives which aim to boost uptake.

Figure 2: language GCSE uptake among pupils by school policy. Credit: Hunter, Arfon and Zhu Hua.

Policy and opportunity

We also explored the impact of the different school policies for two particular groups of pupils: disadvantaged pupils (pupil premium eligibility) and pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) (with and without an Education, Health and Care Plan). Taking year 10 pupils in each of the schools, we first calculated the proportion of disadvantaged and SEND pupils, and we compared this with the proportion of year 10 languages pupils with the same backgrounds. This provided us with a measure of the disadvantage and SEND ‘gap’ for languages in each school.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found that schools with compulsory language policies showed the smallest disadvantage and SEND gap (although it is important to note that many of these schools have lower numbers of disadvantaged and SEND pupils in the first instance). The schools with ‘pathways’ policies had significantly larger gaps (Figures 3, 4).

Figure 3: the difference between the proportion of disadvantaged pupils in Year 10 and Year 10 pupils taking a language GCSE, by school policy. Credit: Hunter, Arfon and Zhu Hua.

Figure 4: the difference between the proportion of pupils with SEND in Year 10 and Year 10 pupils taking a language GCSE, by school policy. Credit: Hunter, Arfon and Zhu Hua.

Pathways policy and pupil intake

When we look in more detail at the ‘pathways’ policy, we can see that it manifests differently in schools: the same policy can be used to enter a very high or very low proportion of the overall cohort. A question we asked schools was about which criteria they used to select pupils for the ‘pathway’ that includes a language; they told us that the decision was based on pupils’ prior attainment and/or likelihood of success in all five EBacc subjects.

Correlational analysis of the schools’ prior attainment (pupils’ Year 6 SATs results in maths and English) and their uptake figures for languages found a strong negative correlation between these two factors: schools with a higher proportion of low-attaining pupils were indeed less likely to enter a large proportion of their pupils for a languages GCSE (Figure 4).

It seems some schools are responding to macro-level messaging and incentives around EBacc entry and are using local policy levers to boost languages uptake (the ‘EBacc pathway’ approach), but they are also wary of the impact on pupil attainment. A weak Progress 8 score has more serious consequences for schools than its EBacc score. For schools with a high proportion of high-attaining pupils, this is not such a problem, and they can confidently enter the majority of pupils. For others, this policy ‘tug of war’ leads to restrictions on which pupils access languages at GCSE level.

Moving forward

Understanding the ways in which current policy at all levels impacts the experience of studying languages is essential if we are to break down the barriers to languages opportunity. Given that the Department for Education is prioritising opportunities for all pupils, we set out the following recommendations:

1. Policymakers, researchers and languages practitioners need to work together to explore what ‘opportunity’ really means in relation to languages. Is the opportunity of languages education inextricably linked to the perceived benefits of the EBacc, or is it about having the skill to communicate? Does opportunity come from simply studying the languages GCSE curriculum, or is it necessary to obtain a good grade?
2. As part of the ongoing curriculum and assessment review, it is important to consider the dynamic relationship between macro-level government messaging (e.g. around the EBacc), accountability measures and the way schools interpret and enact policy. Crucially, we must be alert to the fact that pupil intake profiles greatly influence the decisions made in this process and therefore the opportunities available to schools and pupils.
3. If the pressures driving schools to be selective about who studies languages at GCSE remain, could alternative languages provision and accreditation be considered outside of the GCSE route for pupils who want to continue their language learning journey? Additionally, could this cater to the wishes of pupils to learn non-European languages, for example? We are conducting research to further understand the views of pupils in relation to this.
4. For programmes like NCLE, seeking to promote uptake and achievement in a given subject area, it is crucial that research is conducted to identify the extent to which the system works to create opportunity for all pupils in all contexts.