AI will kill your children and abandon their Granny. Don't use it.

 The worst thing AI has done for me is this:

I was testing its problem solving skills by asking it how to cut a cheesecake into 5 equal pieces. It has given me many absurd answers even including cutting the cheesecake horizontally and then reassembling portions of crust and cream. As everyone knows, the correct answer is to cut it into 6 and make the extra slice disappear before serving the 5 perfectly equal slices. On this occasion it was giving me a spurious method based on the Golden Ratio. I was laughing at this when I noticed the diagram it was giving me to illustrate its method. A guide to the different forms of Female Genital Mutilation. How it had bundled FGM in with How to Cut Cheesecake as if it were instructions isn't a joke. It's abhorrent.

Does this mean that we shouldn't use AI? Well everyone knows not to use it for "factual" information. Because it just makes things up:

You can have fun with variations of this question, inserting your own choice of minor celebrity. What it reveals is how it's never really answering YOUR question. It's trotting out a concocted text that your question may or may not be relevant to. Common questions with an easy answer you already know are more likely to be answered correctly. But why would you be asking for answers you already know?

The same applies to problem solving. AI is NOT thinking about your problem. It is not analysing your situation. It is writing something plausible that sounds as if it might make a good answer.

I tried it with a few scenarios.

I hit refresh on this many times or tried clearer prompts. Each time it gave me a different answer. Its times made no sense. It didn't get me to the beach on time. And it failed to spot that I had frozen items that I needed to get in the freezer.

It can't deal with the simple logistics of getting to the beach on time. Let alone pick up on issues that ought to be dealt with. Are we really suggesting it would be a good idea to delegate planning and decisions to AI? It is NOT making decisions or analysing the situation. It is just cobbling together some words.

It can't do the maths. Can it respond to a simple decision that doesn't involve calculations?

It variously suggested knocking on the door to wake my neighbours up to tell them I was going to be cutting the grass, or practising my drums first...

All very amusing. But how far will its cheerfully delivered bad advice go?

Here it is failing to respond to very young kids being left in a hot car.

I tried this one with mistral chat, Gemini, chatgpt, copilot and perplexity. All showed different degrees of mock horror or glib answers about the ice-cream or the upholstery of the car. Several commented about the kids making a mess. They all gave varying estimates of the temperature from 40° to 60°. None suggested I should check on the kids.

Here it is showing similar disregard for my very elderly mother in law.

It can't process the simple maths of logistics problems and it can't grasp the human dimension of a situation. Because it's not actually doing any analysis or solving. It's just doing words.

So maybe if we don't use it for decision making, we could perhaps use it for drafting?

Like this you mean?

It has no clue.

Why are my experiences with AI so consistently bad? Because I am trapping it into mistakes by asking it things that are a little bit complicated or unexpected. OK then. Use it for highly predictable easy things that you already know the answer to. But what is the point of that? And also think what these experiments are really showing: It does not have the intelligence to think about and solve your problem. All it has is the power to put words together to fob you off. If that's what you want and need in your life and your business, then go ahead and use it!

Challenging the System Part 3: Transition from KS2 to KS3

 Sorting out unfair grading at GCSE, with its immediate impact on pupil motivation to take a language, incentivisation for schools, and on the narrative of national "failure" is the easiest part of the failed system to put right. The tricky ones are What to do about Transition from KS2 to KS3 and How to Offer Mainstream Language Learning Post-16. And writing about KS2 is tricky for me. Because Primary teachers don't need Secondary teachers stepping in to opine on things they have no experience of.

So I need to make it clear that I am not commenting on teaching. The problems are not with teaching. The problems are systemic. And teachers are the ones making things work, even when the system is designed to stop people learning a language. 

What are some of the issues at Transition from KS2 to KS3?

• Pupils start again in KS3, ignoring what was done in KS2, repeating basic content.
• Pupils start a new language in KS3, abandoning what was done in KS2.
• Pupils arrive at Secondary School from many different Primaries, all with different experiences of languages in KS2, including the study of different languages.

These systemic failures are worsened by the fragmentation of education provision and competition between schools which is a deliberate feature of the English education system, in the belief that this pushes up standards. And which teachers constantly have to try to overcome in order to provide a coherent experience for pupils.

This is the current situation: teachers in Primary and Secondary trying to reach out to each other to make things work. In a system that constantly erodes their efforts. Attempts to create a joined up 9 year language learning experience from KS2 to KS4 in a system designed to disrupt collaboration and planning. Decisions made in one school on things like curriculum options, timings, staffing, choice of language, resources, assessment... all have knock on effects across other schools' attempts to create coherence. Managing a joined up learning experience across multiple competing schools can see things fall apart as quickly as they are put in place. A small Primary School appoints someone who happens to speak Spanish. Or the German teacher leaves. Or the school aligns itself with one favoured destination Secondary, based maybe on being part of the same Trust or another school belonging to a rival Trust. A Secondary School decides to stop offering Spanish in Year 7 in order to focus curriculum time on French. Or decides to offer Mandarin as part of a national initiative. Or has different halves of the year group take different languages in an attempt to keep two languages going. A Sixth Form stops offering German, so other schools have to wonder if that means they should stop offering it at GCSE. These decisions are taken based on shifting priorities within an individual school and have challenging implications for language teaching within the school, let alone how to manage the implications for other schools and transition. Top down decisions are not made with languages as the top priority, nor with implications for other schools as the top priority.

In aiming to make a coherent experience of language learning, what chance does something put in place for pupils in Year 3 have of still being relevant wherever they end up 9 years later? There will have been so many changes, transitions and disruptions. A vision of coherence has to be more robust, more purposeful and more fundamental than individual teachers occasionally meeting to have a conversation about topics.

Language teachers are trying to make this work. But the system is against them. As quickly as you put something in place to try to make it work more smoothly, something somewhere changes or doesn't quite work out as planned. And nothing can overcome a situation where fragmentation means there's no coherence in what language pupils study, let alone a coherent experience of progression in the language.

This is not to say that we shouldn't keep talking to colleagues across sectors. But if teachers aren't managing to make something work, it's because it's unworkable.

What options are there to make the system more workable? What would be more robust than asking teachers to constantly shore up transition as it is washed away by the tides?

There is hope that politicians might begin to see the harm done to children's lives by a regime of high stakes competition, commercialisation and fragmentation. But that isn't going to happen quickly. We need to think about how different models can work within the landscape of disruption between schools and between sectors.

One model is to have "substantial progress" in one language at Primary School. The proposals in the Curriculum and Assessment Review would see all pupils in all Primaries having a common grammar and vocabulary curriculum. When they arrive at Secondary School, schools could assume "coverage" of this content and plan accordingly. That plan would still have to cope with individual pupils having different levels of attainment and having studied different languages. But it could reduce the level of variation that currently makes planning for transition so hard. This could reduce the amount of starting from scratch and repetition of content already seen in Primary school. This model could make the work done in Primary harder to "ignore" on arrival in Secondary. But starting a new language on arrival in Secondary would seem a total disruption to this model. These are possible outcomes, and they are a question of degree - aiming to reduce some of the issues rather than removing them. And potentially reducing one issue while compounding another. It seems linked to the idea of learning as "progress" rather than experience. And it sets schools the challenge of having staffing, resources, curriculum and transition in place to deliver the ambition of substantial progress. Is specifying content enough of a contribution to overcoming the system that currently defeats the best efforts of teachers?

Another model is to have more than one language taught in Primary. In itself this seems positive - the more languages pupils have some knowledge of the better! It also allows Primaries to deploy staff with different languages, and potentially lessens the level of language demanded of staff. By design it harnesses the synergies of how learning one language helps learn another, through learning about how languages work and how language learning works. It combines the idea of progress in the languages studied, with a deliberate awareness of the importance of the experience of language learning and learning about languages. This could be a more robust model for transition, where Secondary teachers know that pupils arrive as experienced language learners, with some knowledge of more than just one language.

There is also the Language Awareness model which proposes explicit teaching about language, languages and linguistics. This could remove the issue of pupils arriving at Secondary with progress in a language which is then ignored or abandoned. It would emphasise the nature of other languages being all around us in our community, and the wider world, and also within the English language itself. It would open pupils up to a world where cultures and language are explored together. Would it also include the idea that learning at this stage can be through stories, songs, rhymes, games, listening and joining in, routines and links to other subjects? Or in fact, would a better way to learn about language and linguistics be to focus on learning a language after all?

Reading through these 3 options, I think it's clear that as much as possible needs to be common to all of them. An experience of language learning that is an experience of learning through listening and joining in; that furthers understanding of language in our world and our world through language; that develops understanding of language learning by learning a language. Whether the headline is substantial progress or language awareness, the underlying experiences have much in common. Is this a ridiculous idea?

We are all familiar with these 3 options for Primary languages. The neglected one is the What Happens in Year 7 question. How can we make sure we are building on pupils' learning in KS2, consolidating the basics without repeating content or ignoring their knowledge? Can we have a much more original and creative start to KS3? What would this look like? I would want to see consolidation of phonics, ground rules for active participation in speaking, a focus on developing pupils' abilty to use their language, through cultural content and contact. Our Year 7 French Art Exhibition is an example of how we try to deliver these aspects in a way that will be different to what pupils did at KS2.

The government seems to have gone for the Substantial Progress in One Language model. If anything, I think this is the one that does least to remove the systemic barriers. In fact it may exaggerate them if pupils have made substantial progress in a language that they then do not continue with. It is ambitious in its aims and therefore in the challenges it sets Primary schools, even if these challenges are now to be more clearly defined. Is the danger that in our fragmented system, Primary schools will focus even more on meeting this defined content, rather than on the experience of learning a language and continuity into KS3?

I am glad the government has identified KS2 to KS3 Transition as one of the greatest issues. Their response seems to be to challenge teachers to do the same thing better. This feels unwise. Teachers are the ones who make the unworkable almost work. Teachers are the ones seeing their work eroded in the Sisythean task of building progression only to see it crumble away in the face of the system. I can see that they have gone for the option they see as the most ambitious for pupil progress. Is there wisdom in this choice? Ambition is good. Workable is also good. The calculation has to include both. My instinct is that if teachers are barely managing to make something work, it's because it's unworkable.

This post is in a series called "Challenging the System". I don't seriously think we can change the system in that pupils will inevitably continue to move from Primary to Secondary. There is disruption at this stage, with cohorts splitting up and new intakes of pupils coming together with different previous experiences. We need to accept that this disruption is real. And choose models in KS2 and in KS3 that recognise this disruption and make the most of what really matters in learning languages. Academic assessed and measured "progress" in grammar and vocabulary may not be the only factor alongside experience, attitudes, understanding, communication, ambition and enjoyment.

Challenging the System. Part 2: A Vision of a System that Works

 In an earlier post, I looked at how the system could hardly be worse for encouraging people to continue learning languages: Disjointed Transition at age 11, Unfair Grading at GCSE, and lack of mainstream language learning post-16. Within each of these stages, teachers and learners do a good job. But the system is designed to stymie them at every turn. It is not a failure of teaching. Good teaching is making the best of an unworkable system.

So what would a working system look like? Wouldn't this be nice:

Primary Languages. Not my area of expertise. But we are told that this is the age where pupils learn languages through hearing and joining in, with songs, chants, routines and stories. Where language can be used throughout the day, integrated with everyday activities and across curriculum subjects. We are going to see a greater definition of the detail of formal learning and progression. Pupils and teachers should be confident that languages are a natural part of life in and out of school. It should be a positive experience of openness and celebration of linguistic diversity.

Secondary Languages. An experience of languages which combines all the facets of language learning: communication, grammar, culture, linguistics, self-expression, transactional language. Accumulating more language and knowledge of language will go hand in hand with a growing ability to use the language with increasing independence, sophistication and accuracy. This will be boosted by international ambition where schools use Erasmus + strategically to make cooperation with schools abroad part of school life. An end to unfair grading at GCSE will be transformative in terms of numbers and in the narrative of our success in language learning. And teachers will be able to tell pupils that if they go to University or take an Apprenticeship, they can look forward to studying and working abroad, whatever their chosen path.

Post-16 Languages. The norm and the expectation will be that people learn languages for pleasure, work and study. The promise and the premise should be that the future (University, work, apprenticeship, life) will mean interaction with the international world. That an outward looking perspective will take you places. A Level languages may continue, or academic study of philology may be delayed until university level. Instead, sixth forms and colleges will offer language learning opportunities at different levels and in different languages to all students.

University. The greater number of students continuing at Sixth Form with language study will see a boost for specialist philology degrees. But Universities will stress to all applicants for every subject, that going to university means entering a global environment, working alongside people from around the world in research that transcends borders. It will be normal to study a language alongside other courses. It will be the expectation that students of all disciplines take advantage of Erasmus to study abroad, not just students studying philology degrees.

Hopefully you agree with some of this or have your own ideas that I have missed. And the point is that this vision is actually very close to what teachers are aiming to achieve within our current broken system. We don't need to change teaching. We need to change the system. The question of course, is how to make it work. I don't have answers but I do have thoughts. Will post them soon...

Challenging the System: Part 1 Do you need a degree in philology to teach languages in school?

 In a previous post, I looked at how we appear to have a system designed to stop people learning languages in school. So we need to challenge the system. Here's the first challenge: Does the system exist simply to be a pipeline to produce language teachers to maintain the system? Do we have to base our decisions around the school curriculum and the languages curriculum so that 2 pupils per secondary school per year can end up doing French A Level, then a fraction of them can end up doing a French degree, and then a fraction of them can end up becoming teachers? Is this the raison d'etre for the system we have?

Let's ask the challenging questions... I warn you that the writing here is not well-formed answers. It is nibbling away at the presumptions we bring to language learning in our current broken system.

Do you really need a degree in philology to be a language teacher in English schools?

Philology is the academic study of a language through literary criticism and analysis of socio-cultural texts, history of the language and linguistics.

Quite clearly the answer is no. Primary teachers teach languages, sometimes without even a GCSE. And they make a good job of it. Alongside teaching English, maths, geography, history, music, science and a whole list of other subjects they don't have a degree in. At an appropriate level and ideally with resources and a well-planned curriculum.

Does this apply also to secondary school? Yes it does. The expansion of Spanish is seen as one of the success stories of the last 30 years. Done in the first instance by French teachers who learned enough Spanish to introduce it into the curriculum. Without a degree in Spanish themselves.

Who else? Well, teachers. I have worked with excellent teachers who didn't have a languages degree and either moved into language teaching to fill a gap or qualified as language teachers based on having another degree plus some knowledge of the language.

(We also need to ask the question of just how good the language level of some philology graduates might be. I used to interview and mark subject knowledge tests for a PGCE course. All of the applicants had a degree in languages. Not all of them made it onto the course. Language learning doesn't have to be through A Levels and degrees in literature, linguistics and essays.)

Native speakers. The All Party Parliamentary Group for Modern Languages recently discussed this as a solution to the "pipeline" issues. They pointed out the absurdities of paying bursaries for international trainees who were then unable to take up a post because of immigration hurdles. Although I see the government has now resolved this contradiction by ending the payment of bursaries to overseas trainees.

Who else could teach a language? Well, if we can do away with the ridiculous systemic barriers to language learning, then we could have a wide pool of applicants. Much wider than the tiny numbers who are ever going to study a philology degree. (Although of course, having more people continuing with languages would also mean a wider pool of potential candidates wanting to study philology.)

How would this look?

If it became the norm to study languages (by ending unfair grading at GCSE and offering mainstream language opportunities post-16) we would have a wide pool of people who will have studied a language or languages throughout their school life, going on to University where they could take a language course either as part of their degree or as a stand alone. They could study abroad for a year now we are returning to Erasmus. And then maybe work abroad before thinking of returning to England and becoming teachers.

Another thing. If languages are being taught by normal people, rather than a tiny elite who did A Level and a philology degree, would that have implications for the teaching and learning? Quite possibly. Seeing languages as something normal rather than vanishingly rarified is what we are aiming for.

Could you design a worse system for making sure people don't study languages?

 If you wanted to design a system for making sure as few people as possible learn a language, our school system is perfect:

• "Transition" from KS2 to KS3 where pupils either start all over again in the language they have been studying, or abandon it and start another language.

• Cowardly tinkering with performance measures supposedly to support take up at KS4, while the biggest headline performance measures insidiously disincentivise schools from promoting languages.

• Unfair grading at GCSE, where lower grades are given out in languages. This leads to a bogus narrative that either teaching isn't good enough in languages, or as a nation our pupils are not good enough.

• No mainstream options for continuing to study a language in college 16-18. Just a bizarre niche A Level that is barely suitable even for the tiny minority that do take it. Meanwhile, our young people are avid users of apps such as Duolingo. But in the education system, they are unable to continue with language learning.

• Universities offering degree courses to a minority of the minority who took A Level. Cold spots emerging where courses are no longer offered. Universities offering language courses to students of other disciplines. But who have had a 2 year hiatus post GCSE, or potentially since Year 9.

I have heard Professor Charles Forsdick of the British Academy and Cambridge University refer to the system as a series of "cliff edges". After Year 6, at Year 9 options, and after Year 11 there are built in car crashes where numbers fall off a cliff. But the carnage is not driven by the numbers. It's no accident. The road heads straight for the cliff. Transition. Unfair grading. No mainstream post 16 options. Language learning isn't in jeopardy because not enough people are continuing. It's the other way round. There are reasons why people don't continue. In fact it's a miracle anyone survives through to a degree in languages at all.

What can we do about this? I will examine how we can challenge this system in future posts, starting here by asking if we really need degrees in languages in order to provide language teachers. And this one looking at what teachers might be trying to achieve were the system not stopping them.

But meanwhile one thing is for certain: this is not about the quality or nature of teaching and learning. One look at the broken system tells you that we are not going to solve this by claiming that this or that aspect of language teaching will motivate pupils more. Teachers make each section of the system work as well as it can work. What we need to do is challenge the systemic issues that make the learning a dead-end for the vast majority.

GCSE Options, Take-up, Ebacc? Pupil survey.

 

Year 9 Survey April 2026

We have surveyed our Year 9 pupils after they picked their GCSE options, to see if we can find useful information on what shaped their choices and their attitudes to French. We are a school which did not go down the road of compulsory languages at KS4 for any pupils. Or even any guided pathways for certain groups of pupils. So with the removal of the ebacc, our experiences may turn out to be relevant to not just our school, but to other schools suddently finding the rules of the game have changed.

Our school is very supportive of languages. But not over and above the other subjects. And we historically have a very strong ethos of creative subjects, dating back to our former Specialist Status in literacy, performance and art. These are all aspects that schools will need to take into account, as they juggle the impact of the end of the ebacc alongside new "buckets" for creative subjects. So again, our school may be an interesting one to look at when it comes to the fate of languages.

We normally have about 25% of pupils picking a language at KS4. I don't know if this is what awaits other schools with the changes to performance measures. You would have hoped that schools who told pupils taking a language was important did so because they believed it. Not because they were chasing a bogus performance measure. But stories are certainly starting to circulate of some schools changing their options system. And it turns out that this is the single most significant thing in determining take up of languages. Not the quality of the curriculum or the teaching, or the intake, or parental attitudes. Where schools had high take-up of languages, it was generally because the school made it compulsory for some or all pupils.

What might some of the lessons be from a school that never went down this route?

Firstly, there is no longer a pupil who "should" be doing a language. That high flyer, successful in languages, ambitious and keen: they don't feel they "should" be doing a language. And they quite probably won't. All the other subjects on the list are also perfectly valid choices. And we find we generally have more lower prior attainment pupils picking French.

Furthermore, if this is reproduced across the country, with schools no longer pushing "higher set" pupils into languages, it could completely change the profile of the candidates sitting MFL. And further muddy the waters over the shape of the "curve". As the graph below from FFT Datalab shows, the profile of pupils with lower prior attainment currently taking GCSE is unlike that of other subjects. The last time we had a sudden change to the nature of the cohort, the consequences for MFL grading were chaotic, as shown in this post about the grading of pupils in 2005.

And what about the survey of attitudes of our Year 9 pupils? The graph below would seem to show that lower take-up of languages doesn't mean an outright rejection. It is not the "failure" that has been characterised in some reports. Most pupils were considering taking a language and may have even put it as a second choice. Schools where take up was "low" weren't failing in languages. Take-up was just at a natural level, given the number of subjects on offer. Pupils were seriously considering taking French, but didn't see themselves as "I am the sort of pupil who ought to be taking a language". That idea just does not apply. It exists only in the heads of people who went to school in the olden days, and we need to let go of it.

Year 9 Survey April 2026

This graph is to some extent misleading. Only 50 pupils out of 180 responded to the survey. And it is over represented by the blue section. We do NOT have 38% of pupils taking French next year. The true figure is closer to 25%. This is in line with previous years, except that this year we are no longer offering Spanish, and only a few of the pupils who were hoping to take Spanish have opted for French. So although it means numbers for languages has stayed around 25%, it does mean an increase in the number of pupils opting for French.

So what are the kind of things that pupils are taking into consideration when it comes to options? Is it the usefulness of languages for careers, university applications or travel? Is it their experience of language learning in KS2 and KS3 and the progress they feel they have made? Is it their knowledge of the GCSE exam, perhaps relayed to them by older pupils?

Here's what they said:

Factors influencing my decision NOT to pick French

Factors influencing my decision to pick French

The first graph shows the pupils who did not pick French, including the ones who were seriously considering it or put it as a second choice. The second graph shows the pupils who did pick French.

First of all, "Plans I have for the future" stands out as a reason for NOT picking French. I have written before about how early our pupils seem to have very specific ideas of what they plan to do in the future. And in most cases, a language isn't relevant to their plans. It seems from comparing the two graphs that we are more likely to attract pupils who are more open minded about their future.

Secondly, experience and sense of progress in French so far doesn't come out strongly as a negative influence. It's more likely to be a positive factor.

And overall, "interests and passions" seems an important factor.

It is interesting that the GCSE and grading don't seem to come out as an important factor. But as I explained here, we are careful to hide the truth of GCSE grading from pupils. If we told them it's harder to get a GCSE in languages, it would of course be off putting. In fact it's the assumption that grading is fair, that leads people to the conclusion that we must be bad at learning languages or bad at teaching languages.

The survey also fits in with conversations we had with pupils around their options. So I know those pupils who "should" be taking a language but eventually decided not to. Because they came to talk to me about it. For example our blurb suggests that if you want to be a Primary teacher you should seriously consider taking a language and one pupil wanted to explore whether not taking a language would be an obstacle to them entering the profession. Of course we had to say that it would not. And given that their French is already of this standard (open link for examples) in Year 9, plus they study Spanish on Duolingo, I think they would be well placed to teach a language in KS2. And I have other stories of pupils whose experience of language learning has already been important in their lives. It has taken them places and given them experiences they otherwise wouldn't have had. They have learned how language learning works, and they continue to study different languages online. They have achieved a level in KS3 that would have been GCSE for their parents' generation. (Yes, I taught many of their parents.) And they have made carefully considered decisions based on personal interest and future plans.

What should we conclude from this? We shall see the fallout from changes to the performance measures. And maybe start to think more deeply about the purpose and place of language learning in schools. And how the current structures are not really fit for purpose. But that is for another post...