Skip to main content

Tackling the MFL teacher shortage

If you are teaching in England you may well be aware that the government intention is for nearly all young people to study a language as part of the Ebacc suite of qualifications. That means GCSE MFL for nearly all by 2020. The "nearly all" is not yet totally clear. Some are saying that about 90% of pupils will be expected to do a language to GCSE level. Bear in mind, however, that most schools are under no obligation to follow this directive and the evidence seems to be that many will not. Schools who do not enter enough pupils for the Ebacc have been told they cannot be graded "outstanding" by Ofsted, but even this powerful inducement may not have the desired effect.

To achieve the 90%-plus rate of GCSE entry schools will need to recruit many more language teachers. By one estimate this means 2000 new teachers. There is already a shortage of MFL staff, more noticeable in some areas than others. The government is aware of the issue. It knows that the supply of university linguists is small and that it may not be possible to recruit enough staff from the rest of the EU. Keep in mind that we already depend hugely on "imported" teachers to fill gaps in schools; things may be even trickier if free movement of labour across Europe is limited.

As an aside, if you want to know why the labour government decided to drop compulsory languages at GCSE, read what Estelle Morris, the education minister at the time, said.

Although not much reported, in March of this year the DfE introduced its scheme to attract more people to language teaching. Details are here. They have proposed what they call Teacher Subject Specialism Courses. They could have called their scheme "Make Do and Mend".

This is what they say:

"The purpose of this training is to improve the subject knowledge of non-specialist and returning teachers. It will increase the number of hours taught by offering school-led teacher subject specialism training opportunities. This training is delivered free of cost to participants. This includes: 


  • non-specialist teachers who could potentially teach a relevant subject in addition to their main subject; 
  • non-specialist teachers who are currently teaching a relevant subject either full-time or in addition to their specialist subject teachers looking to return to the profession;
  • language specialists (in the case of MFL) who aren’t currently teaching;
  • MFL language specialists (in the case of MFL who could potentially teach an additional language)."

In a separate guidance document for "lead schools" they say:

"The purpose of teacher subject specialism training for MFL is to provide school-led MFL subject specialism training to non-specialist teachers and MFL subject specialism training to specialist MFL teachers who are not currently teaching MFL and may need refresher training to enable a move back into an MFL teaching role may be looking to teach a new language in addition to their language specialism.

This will build capacity within the system to enable schools to address strategically workforce and deployment challenges to support delivery of the Ebacc and build the skills necessary to enable non-specialists to move into an MFL teaching role or up-skill non-specialists already undertaking an -MFL role. The priority target groups for secondary MFL are:
  • teachers not currently teaching MFL with post A level MFL qualifications teachers not currently teaching MFL with good A level MFL qualifications; 
  • teachers not teaching MFL who are native/near native speakers; 
  • non-specialist teachers currently teaching MFL in addition to their specialist subject; 
  • specialist MFL teachers who are not currently teaching MFL and who need refresher training to enable a move back into an MFL role; 
  • specialist MFL teachers who have the capacity to teach a new language in addition to their language specialism."
So the DfE is happy for teachers with an A-level in MFL to teach GCSE, to "upskill" existing non-specialists and to encourage specialist in one language to do another.

I wonder if the DfE is aware of the evidenced correlation between teacher subject knowledge and teaching quality (it is), as well as just how long it takes to develop skill in a language.

It is difficult to see how this initiative will produce enough properly skilled MFL teachers for the future. The best hope will be to increase further the number of native speakers. When MFL became compulsory in the 1990s I doubt that there were enough good teachers around, but at least there were more graduate linguists coming through the system.

We shall muddle through somehow, victims of a misconceived policy and poor forward planning. Pupils in less favoured areas will have to make do with well-meaning teachers who have trouble stringing sentences together, don't know enough words and cannot explain grammar. The problem does not just lie with MFL, of course. Maths and physics have been coping with under-skilled teachers for many years. That's another story.



 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,