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.
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