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Ofsted calls for pupils to be taught exotic languages
Posted on 21st February 2008
Private school children could soon be learning to count to ten in Bengali, Arabic or Mandarin rather than French, if their schools decide to take up Ofsted's latest suggestion.
The education watchdog said that the languages spoken by minority communities in Britain should be given the same prominence as major European languages like German and Spanish.
The Telegraph reported a spokesman for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) as saying that secondary schools are already able to treat all languages equally.
A government review of language teaching in schools last year found that it would be vital to learn languages such as Indian and Mandarin as those countries rise in social, economic and political importance globally.
The Independent Schools' Modern Languages Association recently criticised the QCA's decision not to reassess the way modern languages are graded, saying the difficult marking system is putting many children off taking languages at GCSE and A-level.
Independent schools have also been pushing recently for changes in the way languages such as Hindi, Mandarin and Arabic are marked, so that a pupil's mother tongue is taken into account.