9. Short Debate: Why don't we love international languages?

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:24 pm on 3 February 2021.

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Photo of Laura Anne Jones Laura Anne Jones Conservative 5:24, 3 February 2021

Thank you, Suzy, for letting me a have a minute in your debate. The learning of international languages I've always thought to be very important, and it's very regrettable that, in the current state system, we have a situation in Wales and the UK where our primary school education system merely pays lip service to them. I attended a Montessori school when I was two until four, a nursery, where I spoke French all the time. Everything was done in French. And I had no idea that that had happened until I got to comprehensive school and then, in my first French lesson, understood everything the teacher was saying and had no idea how I knew what she was talking about. The impact of learning languages at an early age is just phenomenal. That's when children are soaking in languages, and that's why I do French in the bath with my son now. It's just—. It's just—. Their brains are wanting to learn, learn, learn, so that's the time to learn the languages the very best, in my opinion. 

I've always been immensely proud to be Welsh and British most of the time, as we are world leaders in most things, but in languages we lag behind not only Europe but the rest of the world. Modern foreign languages like Spanish, Mandarin and so on—why we aren't learning them is beyond me, especially in an ever-changing world, particularly post Brexit, when we are naturally establishing an array of international partnerships now. It would be of great advantage to our future workforce if they were armed with a few languages. Welsh is great—all for it—but it is not much use on the international stage of business. Yes, English is one of the predominant languages in the world, but we shouldn't rely on everyone else speaking it just so we don't have to learn other languages. We should also be competitively using modern languages, not only for the obvious ever-increasing international networks that we're building now, but also because languages really teach people to engage more sensitively with other cultures and facilitate greater understanding of different heritages. 

I just—