Should all kids learn a second language?

National pushing for long-term plan but Labour says teacher shortage has priority

Should every Kiwi child learn a second language? The National Party is saying “yes” in a controversial new private member’s bill. National’s education spokeswoman Nikki Kaye will release a draft bill today that would require every primary and intermediate school to offer at least one second language from a yet-to-be-decided list of at least 10 “national priority languages”.

She wants to spark a national debate about how to change New Zealand’s monolingual culture. Only 19 per cent of New Zealanders in the 2013 Census could speak more than one language, including only 4 per cent who spoke our second official language, Maori.

“The case for languages is really clear around cognitive ability,” she said.

“We need to legislate for this, it’s not an optional thing to provide that access to languages, and that is a big shift as a country.”

Her bill, which would give legal teeth to a National Party policy unveiled in the party’s election campaign opening in August, would dramatically ramp up what is already a trend towards offering more languages since a revised school curriculum in 2007 said schools should be “working towards” offering languages in Years 7 to 10.

The proportion of all primary and intermediate students learning a second language, in addition to English and Maori, has more than doubled from 13 per cent in the year 2000 to 29 per cent in 2016.

At least some study of te reo Maori has also become almost universal, increasing from 79 per cent of all primary and intermediate students in 2000 to 95 per cent.

However the number studying foreign languages in secondary schools has dropped from 24 per cent of students in 2000 to 19 per cent.

Kaye’s bill would empower the Education Minister to issue a “national language policy” and to prescribe “a minimum of 10 national priority languages, which must include te reo Maori and NZ Sign Language”.

When she first announced the policy in August, Kaye said Mandarin, French, Spanish, Japanese and Korean were “likely to be included”.

She is now calling for cross-party agreement on a long-term policy. “We want to reach across parties. “In order to put the resources into this, you would need to build up to this over time,” she said.

“My ideal [is] that the Government adopts the legislation or principles of effectively universal access to second-language learning in schools.”

However Labour’s education policy did not include anything about foreign languages apart from supporting “community-based programmes” and reviewing funding for “schools that offer bilingual teaching in Pacific languages”.

Its Maori policy proposed that all primary and intermediate students should have te reo Maori “integrated into their learning”, and that every secondary school should offer Maori as an option by 2025.

Education Minister Chris Hipkins said there were clear benefits to more

students learning a second language, but the Government’s focus at this stage was on ensuring there were enough teachers for the subjects already on offer.

“We’ve inherited critical . . . teacher shortages across a range of subjects, including languages, and addressing that is one of our top priorities.”

While Hipkins said he welcomed any opportunity to “find genuine common cause with the Opposition” it had not yet raised the matter of second-language learning with him.

NZ Principals Federation president Whetu Cormick slammed the policy at the time as “out of touch with the realities facing schools today”.

“Teaching foreign languages like [Mandarin] would be a great aspiration once we have addressed the issues of actually having teachers in front of the class in the first place, and sorted the mess that is our current special-education funding,” he said.

Language experts also questioned the selection of languages, noting that National’s list when announcing the policy did not include Pacific languages or Hindi, the world’s third most-spoken language.

Kaye said she wanted to consult widely on her bill before putting it into the private member’s bill ballot.

She said debate would also be needed on practical details such as using language assistants from the community, or web-based “communities of online learning” (Cools)” to help teach languages.