Failure

**Important update. Now this post stands out as a clear calling out of the "gaslighting" MFL teachers suffered under the previous government, I do need to make it clear that there is no personal blame or attack on MFL figures who were trying to make things work. Or indeed succeeding in driving forward the debate around MFL teaching. The Ofsted Research Review was produced in a formulaic landscape of other subject reviews, all tied to the spurious Novice-Expert model, trying to fit MFL teaching into an ambitious step by step approach just as the Frameworks of Objectives had done a generation earlier. And NCELP stand out for their work on an incredibly intricate curriculum where every word counts in a way that had never been envisaged let alone attempted before. And the people leading these initiatives are the most respected and loved individuals in the MFL community. As well as driving forward the debate on language teaching, they are renowned for their generosity and for championing the work of others.

Here is the post as it was written in 2022 under the former government:

 The government want to bring in a new dawn for modern languages. Where teaching based on a meticulously sequenced curriculum of incremental knowledge puts an end to pupils' frustration and confusion. Implicitly (or even explicitly) this is labelling the current teaching of languages as "failing". And putting the blame on the values and practices of teachers.

This accusation of obdurate failure of an entrenched educational "blob" goes back to Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings. They wanted to "move fast and break things" and have said that they were surprised at how far they were able to go without meeting resistance. It is a favourite of politicians who want to be seen to be doing something, or with an idea to push.

So how true is this picture of failure?

If it is based on the level of language that pupils achieve, it's worth pointing out how this has progressed. In the 2000s, for a top grade at GCSE, pupils needed to write short pieces of coursework on familiar topics, including opinions, reasons and reference to past and future. They could do this using all their resources and previous pieces of work. There were marks for presentation. It is what we routinely teach in Year 8 and Year 9 now. At GCSE in 2022, pupils have to write extended pieces in exam conditions, on unprepared questions.

If it is based on the 2016 curriculum review by something called "The Teaching Schools Council", then this was during the disastrous period of the Controlled Assessment GCSE. The exam favoured rote-learning of fancy long scripts. Teachers who tried to teach pupils to speak and write spontaneously using a growing repertoire of language found they could not compete with schools whose pupils just memorised answers. It was the zenith of competition between schools and punitive pressure to succeed. It was the period of targets and the imperative of getting pupils "the grade they deserve". Ironically the Controlled Assessment approach, brought in after the Dearing Report found the speaking exam was "intimidating", turned it into an unpalatable chore. And put a stop to successful language teaching for a decade. I am not confident that we aren't going to return to something similar. 

If it is based on GCSE grades, then these have been set in advance, and are nothing to do with teachers' or pupils' levels of performance. Before the first pupils even started studying for the new GCSE in 2016, it was already set in advance that they would typically get lower grades than in their other subjects. Because this is how the grades are given out. Ofqual know that it is a problem. As I wrote in an earlier post, Ofqual know that grades in MFL at GCSE and A Level are not aligned with other subjects. But it's not their brief to make sure they are. It's Ofqual's brief to make sure standards in each subject stay the same year on year. Within this brief, they have tried to do what they can to move MFL results more into line with other subjects. They looked at the fact that for an elite subject with a high number of A grades, A Level languages had a dearth of A*s. They looked at the effect of native speakers on A Level grades. At GCSE they looked at how levels matched up with European pupils, in a desperate attempt to find something in their legal brief (international comparability of standards) that would allow them to intervene.

And of course because the outcomes are set to be lower in languages, the targets pupils are given are lower than in their other subjects. Giving them a clear (and correct) message that they are likely to achieve a lower grade in languages. What isn't always made clear to them, is that this isn't any reflection of their individual ability in the subject. Or their teachers' performance. Or the difficulty of the content. It is just the way grades in languages are allocated.

If it is based on the number of pupils choosing languages, then how is this judged? The government wants 90% of pupils to be entered for GCSE languages by 2027. Again, we are being set up for "failure". If the government wanted, they could make languages compulsory again, give it back the status of a core subject, have a national strategy and a plan for recruitment and staffing. Instead, they use the cowardly and phoney "ebacc". Which masquerades as something pupils can gain, when in fact as a qualification it is utterly spurious. If languages are one subject in an option block of 5 or 6 subjects, and all perfectly good subjects, like history, geography, computer science, drama, technology... then why is it a "failure" for languages if pupils pick those other subjects. And in many schools the number of GCSEs pupils pick has been reduced, without noticing a particular further squeeze in how many are opting for languages.

In our school, surveys show that the majority of pupils in Year 9 are positively considering taking a language. Even when they don't end up opting for a language. The surveys also show that even before we ask pupils to start thinking about options, our pupils have a career in mind and have ideas as to whether or not a language is important for this. And we know from a recent Cambridge University study, that the parental attitude to languages is twice as powerful as anything that happens in school, when it comes to picking (or not picking) a language at GCSE. 

We mustn't be bullied into thinking we are "failing" because of ridiculous targets.

Then there's the whole caricatured narrative around how we teach. Ofsted seem to think that we have never considered the balance required between a focus on communication and a focus on grammar. Or considered that in the reality of the classroom, the two may not be opposites at all. We don't refuse to teach pupils the sound-spelling link. We don't bamboozle pupils by talking at them in the target language until it alienates them. We don't teach phrases wholesale without pupils knowing what the words mean. We don't have a curriculum driven by ticking off things pupils can say, without thinking about the development of their grammatical conceptualisation. We don't teach lists of nouns without enabling pupils to use them. We don't teach topic content and then abandon it when we start a new topic.

The whole narrative is a political fiction. It's us, the teachers, who are making the whole system work, in the face of the externally imposed nonsense of targets, grading, performance measures, assessments. We'll be the ones making the new GCSE work too.