Motivating learners to become linguists. How can we persuade children to continue with MFL at GCSE and A level?

In recent years, MFL has reached somewhat of a crisis point when it comes to pupil uptake. At KS5 in particular, French, Spanish and German rank within the top 5 subjects with the biggest decreases in entries since 2014, according to the JCQ GCE Trends reports. AT KS4, whilst uptake has increased slightly since the introduction of the EBacc, in the 2024 JCQ GCSE Trend report, not a single MFL was included in the top ten entries for GCSE full course subjects. How can we reverse these trends and provide hope for the future of languages in the UK? Here are my top five tips for increasing uptake, based on my experience of MFL teaching in three different schools:

Consider the specific barriers to uptake within your school and devise a strategic plan to overcome these.

Conduct pupil voice to ascertain why pupils are not opting for MFL, and why some are. This will provide you with context-specific information, allowing you to come up with a strategic plan that is right for your school. In my current school, we discovered that two of the key barriers for uptake at KS5 were that students only had three choices, and MFL would often have been their fourth option. Additionally, we discovered that many of our students had STEM aspirations post-KS5, and they didn’t see how an MFL A level could contribute to their future plans. As such, our resulting strategic plan to increase uptake at KS5 involved two key foci: introducing the AS level, to allow pupils to take MFL as a fourth option, and additionally – making it explicitly clear to pupils that an MFL A level alongside STEM subjects could give them a real USP.

Ensure that pupils in your classroom/department experience self-efficacy.
To opt for your subject at KS4/5, students must feel that they are capable of success in your subject, and of achieving their ultimate goals as language learners. Therefore, as teachers we must ensure that in every lesson, pupils have an opportunity to achieve success. This will almost always involve including additional support in the curriculum, for instance through adaptive teaching or a sentence-builder approach as appropriate to your setting. Students who consistently perform poorly in class and in assessments, are not going to be motivated to opt for your subject. Ensure that your tasks and assessments are designed for all students to experience success, but particularly those who you are looking to recruit for GCSE/A level classes. Consider to what extent your curriculum allows pupils to build their skills and confidence. If you feel that students aren’t making progress, adjust your curriculum by reducing the content and building in sufficient input time for pupils to become proficient at output stage. In the words of Bianka Zemke, lead HMI for MFL at Ofsted, ‘less, done well, is often more’.

Celebrate your students successes with lots of praise.
When learning languages, pupils are often very hard on themselves, comparing themselves to fluent or native speakers. As such, they do not often celebrate the progress that they are making. This is the equivalent of a science student being disheartened that they are not as skilled as Albert Einstein! As their teachers, we are well placed to set realistic expectations for our students and to celebrate their successes with them. This can be through verbal praise in class, through your school praise system, or through praise postcards/ emails home. When students feel that they are seen and their efforts are valued, recognised and impactful, they are more likely to opt for your subject at GCSE/A level.

Raise the profile of MFL in your school, making it a subject that everyone respects and values.
When MFL is ‘talked about’ as a subject that people take seriously, pupils will themselves come to value the subject. Pupils are heavily influenced by their peers, and therefore some effort should be made to ‘put MFL on the map’ in school. This is particularly important for those students who have had no experience of MFL in their wider life, for instance if they do not holiday abroad, or if their parents/carers have not studied an MFL in school. A good way to do this is to encourage the staff body to share their own experiences of languages with their students. In my current school, we have a display board ‘where languages have taken us’ – featuring short articles from members of staff across different departments about how they have used MFL in their lives. Students have engaged well with this, and it has prompted interesting ‘interrogations’ of staff ‘Is it REALLY true that…?’. We have also utilised Languages Ambassadors in our school to celebrate and promote the benefits of MFL. Our ambassadors have taken the lead on whole school MFL events such as European Day of Languages, worked 1-1 to mentor younger students, and supported at open evenings. The GCHQ careers events are another good way of raising the profile of MFL in your school. If you are a HOD, could you consider having a member of staff in your team take the lead on ‘raising the profile’ of MFL?

Get parents on board, helping them to positively influence their child’s options in your favour.

We know that parents have a huge influence on the options choices of their children. When looking to improve uptake, we therefore need to focus not only on selling our subject to students, but to parents as well. In my experience, parents who have themselves had a negative experience of language learning at school, are reluctant for their children to opt for MFL. I have even witnessed some parents trying to convince their children that they don’t have the ‘MFL gene’, stating that they were ‘never good at languages’ themselves. Yet, if parents were aware of how successful their children are in your subject, they would put these ideas aside and instead support their child in opting for MFL. In my previous school, staff made a list of students in their Y11 classes who they wanted to opt for A level and ensured that they were in regular contact with their parents throughout the year. We found that praise cards home, phone calls and emails were a good way to ‘plant the seed’ for a big sell at parents evening. By this point, parents were already aware of how able their child was in MFL, and therefore were easier to win over.

If you are struggling with uptake in your school, consider trying some of the strategies above. If you have any other successful strategies for improving uptake, we would love for you to get in touch via the TTLH platforms on social media.