We now move to the short debate. I call on Suzy Davies to speak on the topic she has chosen. Suzy.

Diolch yn fawr, Dirprwy Lywydd. In 2012, with the permission of Angela Burns, who was our shadow education Minister at the time, I did something which I now wonder whether it was actually allowed, because I launched our trilingual Wales policy on the maes at the National Eisteddfod, and I did it in French, which is why I'm not sure whether what I did was within the rules. I did switch to Welsh pretty quickly, I have to say, partly because the media in attendance looked so utterly shocked. Now, I'm not sure that the local press in other small countries would've been so shocked in such a similar situation. Familiarity with, even if not the understanding of other languages just isn't the stuff of shock in other parts of the world; it just doesn't happen.

However you look at it—culturally, economical or simply in terms of better mutual understanding between fellow human beings—we are at a disadvantage. We are less than we might be, and in Wales we can't afford to be less than we might be. And, in fact, we have an advantage that we don't promote and value highly enough. In theory at least, we are the linguistically agile nation in this United Kingdom. An increasing number of us are laying aside the English-only comfort blanket and are becoming less freaked out about having two national languages at our disposal. The rest of the world probably wonders why having two national languages freaks us out anyway, but I think I'm running ahead of myself a little bit.

The reason I've brought this to the Chamber today is because I think we do share, for a range of reasons, a real worry about the decline in our capacity at population level to communicate in languages other than our own. There also seems to be some considerable consensus between ourselves as Welsh Conservatives, and indeed the Government, and in that I include previous education Ministers, on the introduction of a third language into children's lives in primary school. Of course, for some of our luckier children, it won't be their third language, it could be their fourth or even their fifth.

And yes, there will still be people who blame the decline in modern foreign language skills on the inclusion of compulsory Welsh in our curriculum, but that overlooks the fact that other parts of the UK are also committed to giving children three languages and are facing not dissimilar problems in the uptake of the study of three languages.

The guidance on the teaching of modern foreign languages has barely changed since 2008. Estyn thematic reviews at the time, and again in 2016, didn't paint the prettiest of pictures, effectively saying that enthusiasm and good intentions in year 7, maybe year 8, dissipated pretty quickly due to any number of factors from a menu of reasons given: variable teaching quality; too few lessons; too few teachers with the language as their main discipline; the standards perhaps more generally in a school; problems with the options timetable at key stage 4—I think we're all familiar with that one; the Welsh bac; insufficient collaboration with other schools; the socioeconomic profile of pupils; whether the school is English or Welsh medium; inconsistent support from local authorities; the attitude of school leaders and careers advisors to studying modern foreign languages—just 17 per cent are giving positive messages on the value of modern foreign languages; and of course the perception, and it is just a perception, that languages are just too hard.

For those pupils who do decide to continue with language study at key stage 4 and key stage 5 onwards, their standards of achievement are pretty high. Teachers for those cohorts may feel themselves lucky, as they are getting the children with the greatest aptitude for the subject and the greatest desire to study it, and so we should expect achievement there to be high. But, 'This language is elite'—and I do use that word in the most positive sense—brings its own negative consequences. If demand drops because modern languages are not seen as universally accessible in the way that successive Governments have tried to make sciences, then the number of bright people wanting to teach modern foreign languages also drops.

Minister, we've discussed the targets you've given the Education Workforce Council to try and bring in new students to train as modern foreign language teachers. They're not hugely ambitious, but they're not being met either. It's not a sort of unvirtuous circle, it's more of an unvirtuous downward spiral, and it's something we all want to stop. So, I'm sure in your response, Minister, you'll refer to this being a problem outside Wales, which I completely accept, that Global Futures has achieved something, but I hope you don't mind if we take that as read, because this is a short debate where I'm not on the attack but I'm hoping to share observations and to learn what's been gleaned from your experience to date of trying to reverse that slide in modern foreign language uptake and how it's informed the new curriculum, which is where you hope and we hope that the new language literacy and communication area of learning and experience will bring some real change.

Now, communication. I think what has leapt out at me from all the research and reports that I've read—and I'm sure the Minister and her officials have had the opportunity to read far more—whether they're from Estyn, the Gertner Institute, British Council, Gorwel, the OECD, loads from the EU, medical articles, blogs, you name it, the message that comes through loud and clear is that languages are first and foremost means of communication. But that's not what it feels like when you study it at school. And yet, their purpose as a means of communication, which makes teaching them so valuable and especially valuable to Wales, is because we need to communicate with the world.

And I recognise in that AoLE much of what I read around this subject boiling down to the strength of multilingualism for communication. Without the ability to communicate and understand what others are trying to convey to us, how can we learn to become enterprising participants in our own lives, to become the ethical citizens of the world or to develop the positive relationships?

But, in looking at the aims of that AoLE and looking at the Scottish equivalent as well, the commitment to our children acquiring facility with other languages in any way that can be comparable to the language that they grow up with—it's still quite difficult to identify. I'm not saying it's not there, but I'm struggling to see it.

With more autonomy, of course, some schools will have space and freedom to raise the place of modern foreign languages in their schools as communication skills, as well as more formal, focused learning. But others will use it to let it slide to the minimum acceptable level, because let's remember only 17 per cent of school leaders give positive messages on learning modern foreign languages. If we're to save them, I think we need an additional step, which is a step of accountability. Minister, I do understand your motives for changing what accountability looks like, and yes, I agree with you, it needs to be meaningful. In looking at the new curriculum as a new opportunity for modern foreign languages, I hope that you'll be looking not just at how schools teach modern foreign languages and to how many people, but at how schools use modern foreign languages, and I'm wondering whether this might be built into the work of Estyn, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the programme of international student assessment, if that's relevant, and I don't know how how that works, to be honest, but certainly the internal accountability requirements. It's already my ask for raising our very youngest in two national languages, and I can't really see why the same principle of using language, not just learning about it, can't be applied to a third language as well.

So, I'll be looking again at the research on the best times in a child's development for language acquisition, but I'm hoping you can help me out here, Minister. For, while I recognise that all our children—and I mean all of them—are increasingly at risk of poorer oral language transfer in an era where all ages are glued to the screen, and that some children will have delayed speech and understanding development for a range of the reasons, we still seem to be missing that sweet spot of maximum absorption, of maximum acquisition of more than one language. So, I'm suggesting—at least, I think I am at the moment—that the modern foreign-language element of this languages, literacy and communication AoLE really needs to bite much earlier than perhaps we're seeing at the moment. So, I'd like to hear a bit more about why opportunities in the current foundation phase haven't really been picked up to date, because we'll all know of examples of individual schools where the school leaders really run with this, and the evidence there that, in those cases where there's collaboration between primary and secondary schools, the primary-age children carry that culture of languages with them into year 7. So, I think we really do need to get at the heart of why more primary schools haven't really grasped this opportunity, because that'll give us insight into how to raise the importance of this life skill in local curricula and help us hold schools to account in a meaningful way about the success or otherwise in helping young people be at least confident, and, even better, competent in three languages.

So, why does this matter for Wales? Well, I think there are reasons that we'll all embrace, regardless of our political priorities. We learn language in different ways at different times in our lives and use different parts of the brain. The cognitive effects of this and the honing of different types of learning skill are now well documented and confirmed over convincing periods of review and study, not just for schoolchildren, but for those at risk of dementia and other cognition loss as well. Now, of course, that's not to say that speaking a number of languages would have made me any better as a footballer at school—well, I don't think it would make me a better footballer at all. The reason I actually have a Latin O-level is because it was an alternative to doing hockey. [Laughter.] But it could have helped me with different thinking and learning skills, which would have helped me coach or manage a side, empathise with or motivate and discipline a team, strategise better, understand the finances of a club better, and, increasingly, it seems to me, communicate with the human beings in that team in their own languages, making them comfortable, connected with, included, part of something bigger and committed to participating in something that impacts on the success of others—exactly the type of result we want from a successful manifestation of the new curriculum, and there it is encapsulated in the learning of how to communicate in more than one language.

But I am a Conservative, and so I will finish on some points about the economy. More participants in a prosperous economy can help improve investment in public services whilst reducing dependence on them, so this really does matter, and everything we say about how multilingualism helps with the understanding of others, about enjoying and learning from different cultures, becoming citizens of the world as well as our own cynefin, yes, these are ends in themselves, but they're also completely applicable to helping Wales prosper economically.

I was listening yesterday, actually, to the session on international trade and your, as a multilingual person yourself, Minister, worries about the America first policy, leaving the single market and so forth. It is a big world out there; we have to use what we have to get the most out of it. And so that doesn't just mean exporting more manufactured goods that people want; it's about finding a way to make sure that it's our goods that people want in a highly competitive, increasingly standardised product market. And that's about relationships. It's about communication.

If we want our hospitality and visitor industry to grow, not just in terms of visitors, but also in terms of status, which will make the industry attractive to our brightest and most enterprising people, then making it clear that particular skills in more than one language are a massive asset is something that we've got to get across. Again, relationships build businesses, especially in our service industries, especially in the types of businesses that we already have in Wales. Because this isn't all about multinationals or the types of factory branches that Mike Hedges was talking about yesterday. Multilingualism has fostered trade and the exchange of ideas since ancient times and Britain's push for fresh markets outside the European Union is likely to lead to new language needs. Companies responding to this challenge will depend on a multilingual skills pool for cross-border trade.

Many British people claim that they are bad at speaking languages other than English. Current UK Government stats show that the UK already loses about 3.5 per cent of its GDP every year as a result of a lack of language skills in the workforce. An EU study found that, while businesses perceive the ability to speak English as indispensable, in truth English accounted for only 29 per cent of their future total demand for foreign language skills. It was the willingness to use languages that mattered to the trade contacts, which gave businesses the advantage in those product markets where really there wasn't really much to choose between one country's product and other. And that same report also showed that 945,000 SMEs in Europe were losing trade because of a lack of language competence. 

Wales is an SME economy. It's an economy that's becoming more familiar with the benefits of its linguistic agility, with its own official languages, and, even viewing this through the lens of the foundation and circular economies, the local economy doesn't benefit if the local plumber or the local butcher or the local cleaning firm can't offer services to the local hotel because that hotel is closed because it couldn't compete with chains with slick multilingual staff whose business and leisure clients felt more valued and comfortable as a result.

Just to finish, and I'm hoping, Deputy Llywydd, that you will give me time for a couple of other speakers—

Well, you'll have to name them.

Yes, I shall do, but right at the end.

Okay. Well, yes, but you're at 13:30, so you've got a minute and a half, basically.

Okay. Well, just to finish then, I just want to go back to that 2012 point, when I made that policy announcement in the Eisteddfod. The main reason that I switched to Welsh was actually because I'd forgotten most of my French. It's strange for me that my second language is now Welsh and not any of the ones that I learnt in school or elsewhere, not just because it mattered to my friends and my family, but because customers, clients and colleagues valued me speaking the language that mattered to them. If you make that true for the people's French or German or Spanish or Portuguese or whatever it is, then we have something really special to offer our schoolchildren.

On that, I'm hoping you'll be slightly generous, and give one minute to Mike Hedges, Dirprwy Lywydd, and one to Darren Millar as well.

That'll be interesting to see both of them do their contributions in one minute. We'll have a go. Huw Irranca-Davies.

Me.

Sorry. Mike Hedges. Sorry.

I'm pretty good.

I'll take it back, because Mike is very good. [Laughter.]

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. Can I thank Suzy Davies for giving me a minute in this debate, but also for bringing it forward? I want to concentrate on GCSE options. Without a GCSE in a foreign language, pupils are unlikely to go on to an A-level or a degree in that foreign language. In a Welsh-medium school a pupil will study Welsh language and literature, English language and literature, mathematics, double science and the Welsh baccalaureate. They will be left with three or four other subjects to choose from the different groups available. Is it any surprise that the numbers studying GCSE French and German have reduced? Language Trends Wales states that only 2 per cent of Welsh pupils take a GCSE in a language other than English or Welsh.

I can put some possible solutions: allow pupils to do single science and double modern language; make a modern language compulsory at GCSE; or we can carry on as we are and assume everyone in the world will speak English, especially if we speak loudly.

I just wanted to congratulate Suzy on a tremendous opening speech and simply to say that, of course, school isn't the only opportunity to learn a second language. I'm using an app at the moment, Mango Languages, to try and brush up on a bit of Levantine Arabic in order that I can communicate with some of my friends out in the middle east, and I have to say I think that the technology that we have available to us makes learning a new language more accessible than ever before. One of the things that is being done in parts of the US at the moment and in some of the other European nations, including the Republic of Ireland, is that apps like Mango Languages are available publicly through the library network so that they can be accessible to members of the public free of charge, and I wonder, Minister, whether—it may not be your direct responsibility—this is something you could discuss with your Cabinet colleagues as a tool to bring us into the twenty-first century in terms of the way that we use these new technologies to learn new languages and give people who didn't have the opportunity in school a second chance. 

Can I call the Minister for Education to reply to the debate? Kirsty Williams. 

Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. I'd like to begin by thanking Suzy Davies for bringing this debate to the Chamber today and begin by stating that I believe in Wales becoming not just a trilingual but a multilingual nation. Irrespective of the current political changes that we face, I recognise the importance of teaching international languages within our education system. I'm committed to ensuring that our learners experience the range of benefits from learning international languages, especially at a time when it's more important than ever that our future workforce have the language skills to be able to compete in the global marketplace—a case that was made by Suzy in her opening speech.

I also accept that there are very real challenges associated with international language learning, and that's why, under Wales's new transformational new curriculum, all learners will start experiencing international languages from a much earlier age. As was stated, the new curriculum brings language learning together into one area of learning and experience, languages, literacy and communication. This will provide an opportunity for teachers in Wales to develop and share expertise in language learning to give our children and young people the best opportunity to develop communication skills in Welsh and English and in international languages. In our new curriculum, modern foreign languages is included within the international language section and learners will be experiencing international languages with clear expectations of their progress whilst at a primary school.

Our new curriculum structure will offer exciting opportunities to create a rich and effective multilingual policy for language education in Wales. Learning about languages and culture will play a crucial role in our aim to develop ambitious, capable learners who are ready to be citizens of Wales and the world. This area of learning and experience will encourage learners to be aware of the links between languages as they develop an appreciation for the origins of words and an interest in language patterns. They will be encouraged to transfer what they have learnt about how languages work, for example in English or Welsh, to learning and using that experience while acquiring and learning international languages. This multilingual approach will, I believe, ignite learners' enthusiasm and provide them with a firm foundation for a lifelong interest in learning subsequent languages and literature from Wales and the world.

To build capacity in the system, this year I provided £188,000 to regional consortia for them to support primary schools to develop their language provision ahead of the introduction of the new curriculum. I'm really encouraged that our primary schools are already increasing their MFL provision, and I've supported this with further additional funding for primary school teachers to take part in the Open University's LXT learning to teach languages in primary schools scheme, which offers beginners' courses for French, German, Spanish and Mandarin, but I am also acutely aware of the decrease in the number of learners studying modern foreign languages in secondary schools in Wales. And Suzy is right, we are not alone in this, it's part of a general decline across the United Kingdom, and the reasons for that are many and sometimes quite complex. Now, that is why, since 2015, over £2.5 million has been invested in the Welsh Government's Global Futures programme to improve and promote foreign languages. This funding has resulted in new centres of excellence, where schools work in partnership with universities and partners to improve the teaching and learning experience. This year, in addition to the continued funding for our award-winning MFL student mentoring programme, which is aimed at increasing uptake of languages at GCSE level, I'm also funding a pilot for a modern foreign language student mentoring programme aimed specifically at increasing uptake of language also at A-level.

Now, Suzy is right, there are parts of Global Futures that have delivered and there are parts of Global Futures where we have not seen the progress that we would want to. That's why I will be publishing a refreshed approach to the Global Futures programme in April of this year. And we will continue to work with our partners to support our schools as we transition to our new curriculum.

We must not forget that where pupils are choosing to study—and, in fairness to Suzy, she did reference this—those students who are choosing MFL, well, they're doing really, really well. I've been particularly encouraged by the excellent attainment of MFL students, which is a testament not only to their hard work, but also to the excellent MFL teaching that these students receive. I was delighted that, in the German Teacher Awards of 2019, teachers from St Paul's Church in Wales Primary School in Cardiff and Osbaston Church in Wales School in Monmouth were recognised for their outstanding contribution to the teaching of German in the primary sector, which demonstrates that there is excellent practice here in Wales already, but we need to build upon it.

In the longer term, qualifications for Welsh, English and international languages will also change and we need to work closely with Qualifications Wales to consider how qualifications should change in line with the new curriculum to address the more holistic approach to learning languages. And, like you, Suzy, I believe there should be an emphasis on speaking and communication rather than perhaps the emphasis that sometimes happens in the current system, where there is an emphasis on writing and reading, rather than your ability to communicate with another human being and to be able to demonstrate competency in your ability to communicate orally with different people.

We are moving away from an accountability system with a disproportionate and often unhelpful emphasis on a few isolated performance measures to advocate the use of a wider range of information that better captures the progress of all of our learners and the whole of their learning and experience and our ambitions contained within the new curriculum. Alongside this, we've been developing new evaluation and improvement arrangements that will support the implementation of the curriculum for Wales and be based on the following principles—that they be fair, coherent, proportionate and transparent. We're embarking on a strategic three-year plan for piloting, developing and implementing these new arrangements. Through highlighting aspects of the evaluation and improvement arrangements this year, we will be able to test aspects of the new arrangements and this will provide clarity on the respective roles and responsibilities going forward. The new arrangements will support our aim of raising standards, reducing the attainment gap and, like Suzy, I'm concerned that languages are seen to be deemed to be for a certain type of student, rather than being of value to all students, and, as always, Deputy Presiding Officer, concentrating on delivering an education system that is a source of national pride and enjoys public confidence.

In conclusion, I'd like to state that languages are crucial and very important for Wales's future prosperity and for our influence in the rest of the world. I recognise the challenge in the short term, and, as our changes begin to take effect, we will need to redouble our efforts with partners in this agenda, understanding some of the very real reasons why students choose not to take GCSEs—and Mike Hedges is right, sometimes timetabling issues are an issue— promotion of languages, and the perception that language GCSEs are hard. The Member will be aware that there have already been some changes in England with regard to French and German grading at GCSE, although not in Spanish, and Qualifications Wales and the Welsh Joint Education Committee are looking at those systems within our own system, because there is often a perception that doing these GCSEs is difficult and there are easier things and there are easier ways to get your A* grade by choosing other subjects. But, unless we communicate with students about the importance and the wonderful opportunities that can arise out of acquiring these qualifications, then we won't make further progress. And hence we will want to reflect on that, as I said, in our refreshed version of Global Futures, which will be published later this year.

I understand, and indeed I regret my own failure in this regard, but Darren is right, it is never too late, and, like him, I sometimes can be found, when I am at home of an evening, on my Duolingo app practising a little bit of Cymraeg and a little bit of Espagnol. But there is a long way to go. I will raise with the relevant Ministers the issue about access to online learning applications. Certainly the way in which we can help all children acquire languages and the use of apps within the education system is something that we will need to embrace as part of our future going forward.

But, in conclusion, Deputy Presiding Officer, I'm grateful to Suzy Davies for bringing forward the debate. I think there is a consensus here that this is important to the future of Wales and I believe that our new curriculum and the emphasis on bringing language learning much earlier into a child's life can help us overcome some of the problems that, undoubtedly, we have seen and we will continue with determination to tackle. Diolch yn fawr.

Thank you. Thanks very much, and that brings today's proceedings to a close. Thank you.

The meeting ended at 19:20.