'We're not teaching them to order baguettes' - languages enjoy a renaissance in schools

'We're not teaching them to order baguettes' - languages enjoy a renaissance in schools 10 hours agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleNatalie GriceBBC WalesYsgol Penrhyn DewiYear 10 GCSE French students Kit, Jake, Hugo, Cali and Maisy encountered Chinese, Japanese, Tamil and Spanish when they did the mentoring project in Year 9When Hugo signed up for a project to help him decide if he wanted to study French at GCSE, he had no idea it would lead him to learn Mandarin.The Year 10 pupil is one of a growing number who are helping turn around years of decline in language uptake thanks to a more novel approach to learning, courtesy of the Cardiff University-led modern foreign languages (MFL) mentoring.Project head Lucy Jenkins said it "takes the language learning out of language" by exposing pupils to ideas to make them think about the reasons for learning another language, rather than the traditional vocabulary and grammar.Sport, performance and culture, body language and even gestures are all used in the course and, until a few years ago, no language was taught at all."It's not so you can order a baguette in a boulangerie. It's so that you can understand that other people have different perspectives to you and they see things, feel things, taste things, experience in a really broad way their whole world in a different way," said Lucy.MFL mentoring figures showed increases in uptake for two consecutive years, rising 3.6% in 2023-24 and 9.6% in 2024-25, with 4,292 entries in 2025 according to the British Council.This follows gloomy predictions for the numbers studying the languages by 2030 after the number of pupils in Wales taking French and German almost halved between 2015 and 2021.But as Hugo and fellow pupils at Ysgol Penrhyn Dewi in St Davids, Pembrokeshire, discovered, this innovative programme has helped turn the tide.Lucy JenkinsLucy Jenkins says the purpose of the course is "not so you can order a baguette in a...