Why are schools teaching French and German – not Arabic or Somali?

Earlier this year, Conservative MP Kemi Badenoch stated that the modern foreign languages (MFL) curriculum currently taught in schools does not need decolonising. This is despite Badenoch having no first-hand experience of studying in a UK secondary school, or of teaching in one.

As a 24-year-old French and Spanish teacher who teaches in a secondary school at the heart of a multicultural working-class community in west London, I have to disagree. The current Eurocentric MFL curriculum does not reflect my students, or me, in any manner, and is unrelatable for many of us.

Therefore, it is essential that we start decolonising the MFL curriculum immediately. It should be more representative of the diverse communities in which many of us teach, and in turn encourage students to pursue languages further in their education.

It is no surprise that the uptake of MFL has been in steady decline for a number of years. As key stage 3 and 4 curriculums focus heavily on grammar and omit any cultural context, the common pupil perception that learning languages is not only difficult but also out of touch with reality continues to prevail.

No matter the subject that is being taught, a cultural context is necessary for teaching and learning to occur. It is criminal that in languages – a field that is so culture-rich – we often neglect this context. When I reflect on my own experience of learning French and Spanish at secondary school, I remember the heavy emphasis on grammar, verb conjugations, and speaking with mainland Spanish and French accents.

It’s safe to say that my love of French and Spanish did not come from my secondary school curriculum. Rather it came from music – most notably my mum’s Planete Rap and Buena Vista Social Club CDs. During my first year of teaching, I had ambitions of being the “cool teacher”, sharing this love of European music with my students, but the rose-tinted spectacles soon fell off as the pressures of marking deadlines and data drops sadly left little room for anything outside of the set syllabus.

Unfortunately, class and race also play a part in the low uptake of languages at GCSE and A-level. MFL is an inherently colonial and elitist subject; the fact that French, Spanish and German are the languages taught in schools is a result of these countries having gained “world power” status through their expansive empires.

In the education system, we sadly hold these languages in higher regard than the “community languages” that many of our EAL (English as an additional language) and ESL (English as a second language) students speak at home.

This lower uptake was brought to light in the Language Trends survey, which highlighted the disturbing correlation between schools with a lower proportion of students that study a language past KS3 and those that have the highest number of students who receive the pupil premium, are on free school meals, have lower attainment 8 results, or have EAL. It is known that both class and race are contributing factors to each of these categories, as a direct result of the various forms of racism and classism that exist within British society.

Working-class students are more likely than their middle-class counterparts to belong to either group, and are more likely to be electively withdrawn from languages before reaching their GCSEs. A similar point can be made about race. For instance, research shows that racial discrimination in the form of teacher bias has a direct effect on attainment 8 scores. This is observed most clearly in the case of boys from Black Caribbean backgrounds, who have the lowest attainment 8 scores of any group except pupils from Traveller communities – another ethnic group that faces a high level of discrimination.

Astonishingly, as is the case in France, the secondary MFL research community has opted for a “colour-blind” approach to studying the trends of language teaching in Britain, which has enabled racialised pupils to be discriminated against throughout the system.

This may be the reason why Black students are often missing from A-level and university language classrooms, and why UCAS has reported that there is a disproportionately low number of Black language teachers nationwide.

I firmly believe that decolonising the MFL curriculum is a major step in solving my subject’s problems. I am aware that the statement “decolonising the curriculum” can fill some people, like Badenoch, with dread, as they imagine teachers harping on about white privilege and guilt.

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In reality, the phrase means taking part in the continuous process of acknowledging and critically examining the influence of colonial legacies on our education system. Questioning is an essential tool in decolonising the curriculum because it allows us to observe the different factors that have come to influence it.

We must first question why we teach these languages, by looking into the violent histories of linguistic colonisation. Moreover, we must incorporate culture in our teaching, because it will aid us in identifying the racist and colonial parts of our subject. Through teaching the histories of European empires – and most importantly, the impact they had on the rest of the world – we will be able to ditch our Eurocentric teaching lens.

This will aid us in hosting open conversations with our students about the underlying power dynamics of the hispanophone, francophone and German-speaking worlds, which will enable them to gain a broader cultural understanding of MFL.

Finally, we have to change the often elitist vocabulary that is used in lessons – not many of the students I teach have been horse riding, skiing or windsurfing! Instead, we must replace it with more inclusive language that students can use to accurately describe themselves, such as “I wear a hijab” or “I have braids”. It is through this process of decolonisation that we can make MFL accessible to all children – not just the elite.

Nki Osamo-Wright is a teacher of modern foreign languages in west London