ALL Statement on 2022 GCSE Results.

ALL President Kim Bower comments on this year’s results:

 “On behalf of the Association for Language Learning, I want to congratulate GCSE modern language students on their results, especially since they have had the challenge of undertaking a great deal of work independently due to COVID restrictions on face-to-face teaching.  These conditions posed a real challenge to them and their teachers, especially in a subject which involves extensive listening and speaking.  I thank our community of teachers who did a great deal to rise to this challenge by collaborating in order to extend their teaching repertoire and it was heartening to see so many students responding well to these efforts, showing incredible resilience and commitment.”

We must celebrate that fact that after our many years of campaigning alongside other organisations  for fairer grades, Ofqual have this year required exam boards to make an upward adjustment in both French and German at grades 9, 7 and 4 in order to align grading standards with Spanish.   The alignment is still well below that of the other EBacc subjects, notably History and Geography and as a result, severe grading in GCSE languages remains a serious issue and without further urgent action  to bring language GCSE grades into line with other EBacc subjects we fear that we will not see increased numbers opting to study a language at GCSE and beyond.  We note that Ofqual have committed to review the situation and consider whether any further adjustments are required in future series.

Within the context of a slight increase in numbers taking GCSE, it is disappointing to see that there was a  drop in MFL entries, (particularly in German by 5.1%, 1.9% for French and 1.7% for Spanish).  We hope that these numbers will increase in response to pressure from Ofsted on schools as part of the inspection regime to increase their EBacc numbers.  In practice, this means that schools need to increase the numbers of pupils doing a modern language GCSE.  This was a key part of the September 2019 Ofsted framework, giving schools time to change their curriculum requirements for Key  Stage 4.  We note that the reality is that in many schools they are creating an EBacc stream whereby the more able take a language, and the corollary is that in many schools, pupils who are unlikely to go into that stream may be dropping languages in Year 9 or even earlier. (See the Language Trends reports of 2021 and 2022). It is therefore of utmost importance to encourage students of all abilities to continue languages.