In ethnically diverse cities like London, nurseries and primary schools are full of children who speak an array of languages in the home. But when it comes to modern foreign languages, Britain still performs very badly. We sit at the bottom of the EU's league tables for the proportion of students taking modern foreign languages in schools.
The fact that English is the dominant lingua franca of the global economy has made us complacent and lazy about learning the languages of other countries. We learn languages too late, in secondary rather than primary school, and too few young people bother taking GCSEs in modern languages at all.
What has this got to do with nurseries? Simple: if you want to learn another language, start early. Google 'Mandarin for toddlers' or 'Spanish for toddlers' and you will get a host of private teachers, language clubs and DVDs on offer for parents anxious to get their offspring a head start on a foreign language. The BBC still sells a popular language DVD series for toddlers called 'Muzzy' - a big green monster who gets up to some strange things for the exorbitant but apparently cost-effective sum of £140. Reams of research evidence point to the importance of teaching children languages when they are very young, when their brains are best able to absorb and master other tongues. The older you get, the harder it gets.
This needn't be anything like formal instruction. But once you reach primary school level, teaching languages should start in earnest. In almost every other advanced country, primary education will involve the teaching of English or another modern language. In England, the last Labour government had planned to introduce modern foreign languages as a compulsory part of primary education, but the plans were shelved by the Coalition government, which is now undertaking another curriculum review.
We can't afford to delay. All of our primary schools should be able to teach one of the big modern foreign languages, and we should encourage specialist language primary schools - even Mandarin and Spanish immersion 'free schools'. And we should support our nurseries expanding what they already do to teach children about other languages and cultures.
