CAMBRIDGE University has announced its intention to drop the requirement for applicants to have a language GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education), as too few state school pupils now take them, the Guardian has reported.
From September 2008, Cambridge wants to scrap the system and leave it up to individual departments to specify the subjects and qualifications required as part of their admission process. The suggested new requirements are that students should have “good standards of literacy”. According to Cambridge, discussions have been underway for some time about how this will affect the take-up of languages in schools, and what the consequences will be for the university’s efforts to attract bright applicants who, through lack of opportunity or encouragement, have no language qualification.
The decision was taken after UK ministers dropped foreign languages from the national curriculum for 14-year-olds in 2004. In 2000, 80 percent of students studied a foreign language at GCSE level while the number of state schools where students are required to study a foreign language after 14 is now around 17 percent. Cambridge says it has been forced to review its admission procedures because standards in language teaching in state schools have fallen so much that requiring a language GCSE has become tantamount to discriminating against state school pupils.
Cambridge is the only university that requires students to have basic modern languages qualifications in the UK. The University of Oxford gave up the language requirement in the early 1990s. David Vanstone, head of North Cestrian Grammar School in the UK, said the removal of minimum requirements could make it more difficult for Cambridge to identify the brightest students.
Geoff Parks, Director of Admissions for the Cambridge colleges, said abolishing the need for a language GCSE would remove a significant barrier impeding access to Cambridge. “We would still encourage all young people to learn a foreign language, and highlight the fact that students at Cambridge are able to study no fewer than 140 different languages through the provision at our excellent Language Center,” he added.
Critics said other top universities were going in the opposite direction. University College London announced in 2006 that it was changing its admission criteria to make a modern foreign language a compulsory condition of admission in 2012 in an attempt to encourage more schools to teach them.
