The Guardian reports that two-thirds of state secondary schools in England now offer only one foreign language to all pupils at Key Stage 3 (11–14). German is the biggest casualty of this contraction: it is taught in barely a third of state schools. Meanwhile independent schools still maintain a wider linguistic repertoire. Teacher shortages, underfunding, and a long feedback-loop of low take-up → less provision → even lower take-up seem to be driving the squeeze. The UK government has launched new “Language Hubs” to try to reverse the trend, but the scale looks small compared to the structural slide.
Seen in a post-Brexit frame, the picture is even more ironic. Brexit was rhetorically framed as a way to “go global”; logically, that should have made more multilingual competence essential. But the schooling data suggest the opposite dynamic: a shrinking linguistic horizon, a kind of quiet monolingualisation inside the very society that now needs multiple linguistic bridges to navigate non-automatic international mobility.
In the EU, English still functions as lingua franca; but in England, plurilingual capacity is weakening. That divergence is one of the most curious symptoms of the post-Brexit era: Europe remains structurally multilingual, but England is increasingly socially structured for “one foreign language is enough”. For language education, policy, translation/localisation professions and future intercultural labour markets, this is not a trivial development. It is a structural one — and it will shape who can actually participate globally, beyond slogans.
What do you think is driving this? Is this a temporary post-Covid teacher-shortage artefact — or a deeper shift in how England imagines languages? And is Brexit pushing the UK towards the world economically — or away from its languages?