Watson welcomes language curriculum shake-up

6.06.30pm GMT Mon 5th Feb 2007

Graham Watson, Liberal Democrat MEP for the South West and Gibraltar, believes today's announcement to introduce major world languages into the classroom will help our children to gain employment and communicate on a global stage.

Commenting from Brussels, Graham Watson said:

"For some time now I have been arguing that language teaching in our secondary schools needs to be revamped in order to reflect today's dominant world languages. As the world's most spoken language I am pleased to see Mandarin Chinese included in this overhaul to be introduced at Key Stage 3. But I am surprised that less of an emphasis should be put on Spanish. Given its global reach, we should give children every opportunity to learn this in addition to Mandarin Chinese. Speaking English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese enables people to communicate and do business with over a quarter of the world's population.

Plans for the inclusion of non-European languages such as Arabic and Urdu are welcome, though given the government's lamentable record on language provision in schools, surely it would be better to concentrate on how we are going to recruit extra Mandarin Chinese teachers and how this teaching will be administered?"

Graham Watson has for a number of years been pressing the need to introduce Mandarin Chinese into schools in the UK. He is currently looking at ways to bring Mandarin teaching assistants to various schools in the South West to offer Mandarin Chinese as early as September 2007.