How foreign pupils ‘make language tests tougher for UK children’

NATIVE speakers of foreign languages may be putting other pupils at an unfair disadvantage by taking A-levels in those subjects, say watchdogs.

Ofqual has launched an investigation to discover how many teenagers are taking exams in their mother tongue and whether it is affecting the grades awarded.

The regulator said the main concerns centre around the most popular subjects including French, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian.

Those taking qualifications in languages do not have to declare whether they are learning it from scratch. Because grade boundaries are set after the results come in, a large number of native speakers achieving very high marks could mean the standard needed for an A* or A grade is made much higher.

This could result in non-native speakers receiving lower grades than they would have done had there been no native speakers.

Ofqual has asked schools for details of how many of their students who take the subjects are native speakers.

In a letter to head teachers, it said it would use the information to determine ‘whether any action needs to be taken’, the Times Educational Supplement reported.

Rachel Taylor, a research fellow for the regulator, said in a blog post: ‘ We’re conducting the research because we know from anecdotal evidence that there are concerns about the potential impact of native speakers on A-level modern foreign language results.

‘In particular, there are concerns that the number of native speakers is increasing and that, as a result, students for whom the [language] is a second language are being disadvantaged.’

She added: ‘It’s about improving our information about the students sitting each subject and how they perform, and ensuring that all students are treated fairly.’

The investigation comes amid concerns about a decline in language learning in England’s schools and colleges. Entries for A- levels in French and German have fallen every year since 2010.

The Language Trends survey, carried out by the Education Development Trust, published in April, showed that the introduction of the English Baccalaureate performance measure, under which schools are given an incentive to enter more pupils for language GCSEs, has had ‘little impact’ on the take-up of language A-levels.

The report found that many schools put this down to ‘the widely reported inconsistency of A-level exam marking and the resulting difficulty of getting a top grade in a language’.

About one in six primary school pupils do not have English as their first language. These demographics are set to transfer to secondary schools as the current cohort gets older.

‘Treat all students fairly’