Modern languages are a passport for Brexit Britain

Can anyone remember why the British are so bad at languages? I expect it’s just another shameful, chauvinistic legacy of Empire, like sugar and thespians with white male privilege.

That, or the fact newsreaders can’t pronounce “loch”, much less szczęście which, as any fule kno, means happiness in Polish.

Whatever the cause, a freefall in student applications has prompted the University of Sunderland to ditch its modern languages department, along with history and politics.

The emphasis will instead shift towards “employment-facing” courses – although, with a week to go before Brexit, I should have thought the ability to communicate with our prospective trading partners would be the very definition of employability.

The truth is that lack of language skills is costing us 3.5 per cent GDP. Just 32 per cent of UK 16-to-30-yearolds feel confident reading and writing in another language, compared to an 89 per cent average in the EU.

And fewer than half of GCSE pupils take a foreign language, compared to 76 per cent in 2002. It’s no longer compulsory. I think it should be.

Last year, an all-party parliamentary group concluded that this decline in language skills was “disastrous”. It launched a national recovery programme, arguing that languages were not just an issue for schools but also the Government, businesses and higher education institutions.

“Colleges and universities must protect and expand their language courses to stop degree courses from closing,” was the verdict.

Sunderland clearly didn’t get the memo, but we must start teaching a second language in primary school. Not as a breakfast club add-on, but as a key plank of the curriculum.

Too many of us take it for granted that English will remain the lingua franca. It may be so, but to enter talks not understanding what is said behind our backs, or indeed to our faces, puts us in grave danger of economic disadvantage and political isolationism.