The procession of university language closures will trip up UK diplomacy

The government needs to signal its demand for elite foreign language skills before more universities leave provision to inferior alternatives

Below my article in the Times Higher Education Supplement of yesterday about the depressing closure of foreign language degree programmes at British Universities. I have built a relationship wtih Nottingham University since I left the diplomatic service and they have a fantastic Russian language programme. That may soon disappear at a time when the Foreign Office itself continues to perform woefully in training diplomats internally. Depressing and the government is clearly clueless in charting a way forward.

As a former diplomat, I am acutely aware of the value of learning languages – and the paucity of opportunities in the UK to do so well.

That is why I am so disappointed by the University of Nottingham’s decision to suspend applications to its foreign languages degrees. The result is that one of the largest modern language units in the UK, at an institution that loftily describes itself as Britain’s global university, may be forced to close in the coming years.

The nearby University of Leicester is also consulting on ending modern language programmes. And these two institutions are just the latest to put language teaching in the cross hairs, following in the bloody footsteps of Cardiff, Sheffield, Lancashire and Aberdeen universities.

Clearly, universities should not be expected to maintain teaching programmes at a loss. Nottingham has a £30 million funding shortfall (although that hasn’t stopped it planning a £150 million medical school, which a faculty member described to me as “the vice-chancellor’s white elephant”). But the progressive closure of foreign language degree programmes is especially worrying because of the desperate need for language skills in government.

More than ever before, we need British diplomats, spies and soldiers to speak the language of our adversaries. We need universities like Nottingham to be pumping out Russian and Mandarin graduates each year, to work across Whitehall.

A British Academy report from 2013 on the need for foreign languages in diplomacy and security recommended strengthening the pipeline between academia and government. Practically nothing has been done to advance this agenda in the intervening 12 years, however.

My old department, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), has a dreadful track record in training its staff to speak foreign languages. A target recommended in 2018 by the Foreign Affairs Committee for 80 per cent of diplomats who study foreign languages for their jobs to pass their exams, has never been met.

Today, 30 per cent of officers who are paid full-time to study a foreign language ahead of their overseas posting will fail or simply not take the exams. That’s a drop of 3 per cent since the FCDO’s creation (through the merger of the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development) in 2020, when then foreign secretary Dominic Raab famously – in diplomatic circles, at least – expressed his desire for Britain’s diplomats to become proficient, instead, in the use of Excel.

A British diplomat going on an overseas posting to an Arabic country may receive almost two years of full-time language training, including a student year in Jordan, all on full pay with overseas allowances and a travel package. This costs up to £240,000 per person. And yet 64 per cent of officers who take the training fail to reach the required standard.

The picture isn’t much better for Mandarin, in which 46 per cent of officers fail to make the grade (at a cost of up to £262,000 per person), or Russian, for which the figure is 40 per cent (at a cost of up to £167,000). Indeed, 33 per cent of Britain’s ambassadors don’t hit the operational language standard of C1 (“proficient user”), while 72 per cent don’t hit the higher standard of C2.

Yet the FCDO lumbers along in the belief that it should stick to its ancient system of training its linguists internally. Except that “internally” does not quite mean what it used to mean. Until 2007, the Foreign Office had its own fully staffed language school, but it now relies on a generic contracted provider of bulk language training services – in a post-Covid world in which freelance teachers increasingly want to teach online. It clearly isn’t delivering the results the FCDO needs, wasting millions of pounds each year.

That leaves the UK with, on the one hand, universities that increasingly won’t train Britons in foreign languages, and, on the other, with a Foreign Office that can’t.

There is a much deeper problem here, of course. Fewer British students want to study foreign languages. The number taking a GCSE in modern languages has fallen by 28 per cent since the requirement to do so was abolished two decades ago. But it is striking that in the third decade of the China-driven “Asian Century”, even applications to study Mandarin at university are falling – down by 21 per cent since the 2012 London Olympics, the high water marks of the UK’s international engagement this millennium.

Why? One major reason is that the government does not signal any demand for foreign language skills. Brexit has only cemented a dangerously misguided sense that international engagement is not essential to the UK’s future.

If we want young people to study languages, the government needs to show that doing so can lead to real and exciting careers. That might involve creating foreign language degree apprenticeships, for example in Russian and Mandarin, as well as a Fast Stream graduate entry programme to the Civil Service for graduates in foreign languages.

But this would require a level of cooperation between the government and universities that, despite being recommended by the British Academy 12 years ago, doesn’t currently exist

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