Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am grateful to have the opportunity to raise the issue of the need for the Minister to provide an update on the provisions in place to assist primary schools in the teaching of foreign languages within our education system. Every Member will know and appreciate the importance of modern languages and of familiarising ourselves with such languages, particularly in the ever more globalised and interdependent world in which we live and in which our economies and societies operate. We also know, and this is clear both from the point of view of experts and anecdotally, that the younger a person learns a language, the greater their ability to soak it up, absorb it and become familiar and fluent with it.

I wanted to raise this issue because I visited a school in County Wicklow recently, the Jonathan Swift national school in Dunlavin, and was struck by the efforts being made there to teach the school pupils Spanish. I wish to share some of the comments made by the school principal in an e-mail to me. She said that the children are very much at a disadvantage for their future careers because of the lack of other language skills. To this end, the school was part of the initiative and pilot scheme for modern language tuition, which has since been abandoned. It had built up a lot of resources and skills from being part of this programme, so decided to keep it going using its own resources. The children love learning Spanish and it has improved their attitude to learning Irish greatly, which they now see as another language. This school has been extremely creative. It has a Spanish secretary within the school, it has twinned with a Spanish school and the students come on exchanges. I visited during a recent exchange when there were teachers and students from Spain there. The school has been creative and has developed a culture and relationship with other schools.

I understand the modern languages scheme was a pilot scheme and know there is a body of work being done in regard to literacy and numeracy and how modern languages can fit into that. However, there is a need to report progress on this. This is not just my opinion. As recently as the week before last, the Minister for Education and Skills urged more Irish students to learn Chinese and pointed out the importance of Mandarin as the most widely spoken language in the world. He also spoke about how big a market the Chinese market is from the economic point of view. Therefore, I know the Minister and Minister of State recognise the need for educational skills in the area of languages.

However, when it comes to where we stand globally and in regard to our European colleagues, the situation is embarrassing. An OECD report from last year, June 2013, entitled Education at a Glance, used the school year 2010-11 as a reference point. It found that modern foreign languages account for an average of 6% of compulsory instruction time across the OECD at primary level and 7% of compulsory instruction time across the EU, in contrast to a near negligible amount in Ireland for that age group. When we look at the table on page 18 of that report, we see the "No Grade" that Ireland gets.

I know the situation here is further complicated by the fact that our students, quite rightly, learn Irish as well, that there is a limit in terms of the length of the school day and that the Government has focused on numeracy and literacy. I understand the rationale behind that. However, we must recognise the importance of modern languages. We must work out how we can fit this into our curricula and into numeracy and literacy, because foreign languages can be dealt with in that context also.

Learning and introducing people to languages at second level, when their European and global peers have been introduced to a foreign language perhaps ten years earlier, puts our students at a disadvantage. The Minister of State and his ministerial colleagues and people in the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation will have seen that when it comes to trying to fill vacancies, including back to the Paypal jobs in Louth, there is a demand and requirement for applicants to have a second modern language. While we cannot fix this overnight with our primary system, we can send out a clear message that we want our students to be more proficient in modern European languages and languages like Mandarin Chinese, as the Minister suggested.

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