Is there an upside to the MFL teacher shortage?
Hi, I'm Chris. Head teacher at OuiCommunicate.
We're home to speakers of English who wish for a step up from traditional French classes.
In this article we'll address the MFL teacher shortage in the UK.
Schools everywhere are struggling to find teachers...but how bad is it in terms of real-life consequences?
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Is there an upside to the MFL teacher shortage?
And does it matter on a real-life level?
I’m a British MFL teacher with the QTS. I was raised on the continent and decided to finally live full-time in the UK around 2016. I pictured myself with my leather satchel under my arm, my tie flying behind me as I ran past the ringing church bells to the amusement of the vicar on my way to my quaint East Midlands school…something like that.
Romantic or not, I did have a vision of teaching French or English in a UK school. Even German, for which I am qualified also. I didn’t foresee any unreasonable obstacles to this ever happening.
The fact is, I never did work in a UK school. I learned two things: the first is that all the jobs are in the hands of recruitment agencies, the second is that private tutoring is a huge market in the UK. The two have combined to be a part of schooling in the UK and both play into the normal functioning of education.
We could almost say that if we suddenly removed these two partners, UK schools would no longer be able to function normally. Even less so than at present.
And look at me now. A French teacher in a league of his own, perfectly bilingual in French and English, Master’s degree, the QTS, running his own online school but not “good enough” for the UK.
When journalists report the MFL teacher shortage in the UK, they are not looking at the full picture. They don’t mention that there are substitute teacher agencies that run full time and hire out teachers by the day for considerable amounts of money. They don’t talk about how sub agencies are now partners with schools.
When a teacher in the UK falls ill, needs a break or simply doesn’t “feel like it” this week, it is actually good for business. Or at the very least these teachers have peace of mind knowing that a replacement is easily available.
For three years, I worked for such an online tutoring company that charged upwards of 50£ / hour to families, local councils and schools. This company were raking in the profits. Several full-time staff, an office, enough profits to pay for their families’ needs and the salaries of their staff. This was no small operation and all the while an endless supply of kids were not in school.
Imagine setting up an expensive tutoring business specifically for kids who don’t go to school? Seems to go against any business sense. Well, it worked really well. They were making bank.
And the level of teaching? It was a joke. A software that was designed to click on the right answer on a screen. A kid just had to click on the multiple choice options until they got the answer right.
Considering I never could find work in a UK school, the sales pitch of the agencies must have been all the more funny: “Hello! this is tutoring agency XYZ. We have a brilliant software for your pupils for which they just have to click on answers until the right one comes up. We are available 5 days a week, all day.”
The rest of what I witnessed in the UK was just as bad. The teacher supply agencies are the gatekeepers to UK schools. This list shows that in the East Midlands alone there are 30 such agencies. And they are most likely not sitting idle.
Are UK kids missing out on foreign languages?
Let us imagine a “normal” educational scene in which UK teachers do their job with only the occasional interference from supply agencies. What would happen in this ideal scenario?
Would the kids become well-versed in French, Mandarin or German? Would they leave with their GCSE or A Level, ready and able to integrate into a business located on the Continent?
We can make an educated guess by looking at the results in Belgium where French-speaking pupils don’t speak Dutch on any good enough level despite over 10 years of Dutch classes.
The results might also be similar to what we can observe in the US, where almost no pupil graduates from high school with knowledge in Spanish.
What would make us believe that the UK can make it any different than the results shown in these two countries?
The shortage of MFL teachers in the UK is not the tragedy it appears to be. In a perverse sort of way, the stranglehold of tutoring agencies prevents the truth from being seen in daylight: that schools were never designed to teach MFL languages.
The positive aspect of having MFL in schools is to be introduced to other languages. Pupils can get a taste of French or Mandarin for their personal culture. It’s when schools appoint themselves the role of teaching these languages on a more serious level that the promises are not kept.
Has any video ever been published showing a UK pupil speaking beautiful French? Do people usually seek out school textbooks to teach themselves a good level of German? Are school programs used as references of quality in the language-teaching industry?
If the answer to all of these is “no”, we can ask ourselves what exactly the journalists are deploring when they lament the lack of MFL teachers. Is it the principle or is it truly the annual loss of good British speakers of foreign languages?
Teaching MFL language classes in a mid-level sort of way brings a pupil to A2 level, which translates to “being able to put a few simplistic sentences together but unable to function on a conversational level”.
Are pupils really missing out on that much?
What can families do next?
If UK schools continue on their path, working hand in hand with the many supply agencies and gradually diminishing the availability of MFL classes, it can only mean one thing: more room in the curriculum for subjects that can actually be learned in school.
Subjects such as chemistry, geography, history or spelling require much less complex and well-rounded skills than learning a foreign language. One need not go on a battlefield, handle a musket and experience a charging army to remember that Napoleon fought many battles. We are remembering facts.
Contrary to the majority of the other subjects on the curriculum, languages are systems. We express ourselves in a language system that is different from ours. Some simple systems can be studied in school such as maths equations, writing essays or calculating the area of a geometrical shape, but they remain relatively minimal in number as well as being better suited to a classroom.
Maths does not rely on the addition of 4 skills to be complete: tenses, spelling. hearing and speaking. No pupil is ever asked to listen to maths on the radio and write down what was said. There is never the risk of using the wrong maths in the wrong situation as is the case in languages. There is no “idiomatic maths” as there is in languages. No one has ever said: “It’s not an actual square root, it’s an expression”. No teacher has ever commented on the use of register and style when doing a maths problem.
To the UK families who wish for their children to learn French, Spanish, German or Mandarin, I would say: “trust a professional, they wouldn’t have learned it anyway.” At least not in a way that would have made them comfortable and autonomous speakers and users of those languages.
They would have gained an exposure to those languages and even a good idea of how they function as systems. Perhaps even they would be past A2-level and almost able to follow a conversation. But little less. They would still require a real competitive course when they left school. Worse even, perhaps that course would have had to correct some very bad habits picked up in school regarding pronunciation. And there is nothing quite harder than un-learning a bad habit and teaching the brain to make new connections.
Because knowing a language requires at least a B2 level on the CEFR scale, anything less is as good as not having that skill at all. Having “a bit of French” does not allow one to answer a phone call in French and deal with a customer. It does not allow a person to invent a catchy slogan in French or design a webpage in French.
Throughout History, the “true” truths have been known to hurt: the Earth was not the center of the universe and earthquakes were not caused by angry demons.
Perhaps it is time to admit to ourselves that teaching (and learning) foreign languages in school requires many more means than have ever been seen in UK schools in History.
Perhaps it is time to admit to ourselves that teaching (and learning) foreign languages in school requires many more means than have ever been seen in UK schools in History.
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