Brexit:
Foreign Language Teaching and Public Service Interpreting - Question for
Short Debate
– in the House of Lords at 7:42 pm on 23rd January
2019.
Baroness Coussins Crossbench
To ask Her Majesty’s Government how immigration
policy post-Brexit will take account of the recruitment of European Union and
other foreign nationals to jobs in teaching modern foreign languages and public
service interpreting.
Baroness Coussins Crossbench
My Lords, first, I declare my interests as co-chair
of the All-Party Group on Modern Languages and vice-president of the Chartered
Institute of Linguists. We have a small but expert group of speakers this
evening, and I would like to put it on record that many others have contacted
me to say that they would have liked to take part but could not—notably the
right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds, who used to work as an interpreter
and a GCHQ linguist.
In this short debate I will focus solely on how a
future immigration regime must be finely tuned so that would-be immigrants to
the UK, or people who are being specifically targeted for recruitment here to
work as teachers of modern languages or as public service interpreters in our
courts, police stations and health service, are not denied entry because of a
salary threshold they cannot possibly meet, or because they are not regarded as
sufficiently highly skilled to qualify.
We need to get this right for three big reasons.
First, modern languages—already precarious throughout our education system—will
suffer a body blow if schools and universities cannot recruit foreign
nationals. An estimated 35% of MFL school
teachers are non-UK EU nationals, with a similar proportion in the HE sector.
Until we have a long-term strategy to produce enough linguists who will go into
teaching, we need to be sure of the supply chain from abroad—mainly from
France, Germany and Spain.
A salary threshold of £30,000, as proposed by the Migration
Advisory Committee, would be a devastating barrier. The MAC acknowledged this
in relation to education in general, but the problem is particularly acute for
linguists. The National Association of Head Teachers said earlier this month
that modern languages were among the subjects already most at risk from the
drop in applications by EU nationals. The shortfall will only get worse with a
salary threshold of £30,000. Government figures show that only 88% of the
target number of MFL teachers were recruited in 2018, yet the demand is set to
rise further, not least because of the Government’s own admirable policy that
90% of pupils should be achieving the EBacc by 2025. To do that requires them
to do a language GCSE. This policy is doomed to failure unless the crisis of
MFL teacher supply is urgently addressed. In the short to medium term, that
cannot be done without overseas recruitment.
The salary range outside London for the first four
years after qualification is £26,700 to £29,800. In the HE sector, staff need
to be at spine point 28—more than half way up their pay scale—before they break
the £30,000 barrier.
Classroom language assistants are also crucial for
MFL in schools, and no fewer than 85% of them are currently from the EU. Many
of them—the British Council estimates about 10%—are keenly recruited by their
schools to convert from classroom assistant to trained teacher status. This is
hugely beneficial to the MFL teacher supply chain, and would be threatened if
the individuals could not meet new immigration conditions with which they would
then have to comply. So I ask the Minister to give specific consideration to
this point when formulating the new rules.
The second reason we must get this right is that
the administration of justice and the quality of healthcare will suffer if the
shortage of public service interpreters—PSIs—gets any worse. These are the
people who are called out every day to police stations, courts, GP surgeries
and hospitals to translate and interpret for defendants, witnesses, patients
and their families. A few days ago, in answer to a Written Question I was told
that the Government have “no plan currently” to alter the provisions of the EU
directive which gave the right to interpretation and translation in criminal
proceedings, which was transposed into UK law in 2013. But I am slightly
suspicious about that word “currently”, so I ask the Minister to state
categorically tonight that after Brexit the Government will not remove or water
down those rights.
Around one-third of PSIs are EU nationals and, as
with teachers, we need to continue to recruit them, not just look after the
ones who are already here. A salary threshold of £30,000 would be even more of
a barrier for them than for teachers because most are freelance, on an average
hourly rate of around £15. An interpreter working solely on jobs paying the
highest rate of £20 an hour, paid for six hours a day of face-to-face
interpreting and working for 48 weeks a year, would still be earning only
£28,000. Many are earning far less than that. Yet their work is highly skilled,
often requiring technical and specialist vocabulary, and knowledge of the
justice or healthcare system. Without enough properly qualified PSIs, we would
undoubtedly see more of the kinds of cases reported in the Times last week, in
which unqualified so-called interpreters were used by one agency for police
interviews, resulting in such unprofessional behaviour that a criminal trial
collapsed. This not only affects people’s rights but results in unnecessary
public expenditure if a retrial or further detention is involved.
The All-Party Group on Modern Languages heard
evidence recently from police and researchers working on transnational crime.
They told us that terrorism and trafficking in people, drugs and firearms are
becoming ever more sophisticated and complex across borders and languages, and
that without linguists the police simply cannot do their job. Languages
commonly required include Farsi, Kurdish and Nepalese, as well as EU languages
such as Polish and Portuguese.
The current Immigration Rules include
a shortage occupations list, which has a category for secondary school teachers
of maths, physics, computer science and Mandarin. I ask the Minister to amend
this to cover teachers of all modern languages. We need competence in Mandarin,
of course, but we also need traditional European languages more than ever.
Schools have just as much trouble finding teachers for these. Will the Minister
add to the shortage occupations list a new category for the professionally
qualified translators and interpreters who will be working either in public
services, as I mentioned, or in the private sector, where their language skills
will help build export growth and competitiveness?
That brings me to the third reason for making sure
that we get this right: it is in the national interest, by which I mean the
economy and our capacity to play our part on the world stage through soft power,
international organisations and diplomacy—in other words, everything that is
often rather crudely summed up as “global Britain”. We need dramatically to
boost the numbers of school leavers and graduates who can speak more than one
language proficiently, yet since 2000 more than 50 universities have scrapped
some or all of their modern language degrees. We must not add to this erosion
by depriving the sector of the foreign nationals who make up around a third of
its language staff. Lack of language skills is a serious constraint on
employability; the UK loses 3.5% of GDP every year in missed contracts because
of a lack of language skills in the workforce.
Language education, as I hope I have shown this
evening, is currently heavily dependent on the body of teachers we are able to
recruit from overseas. A strategy which could, over time, produce enough
homegrown linguists must be the subject of another debate. My key message
tonight is that in the short to medium term, we would be shooting ourselves in
the foot as a nation if we allowed language skills to suffer by knowingly
placing unnecessary obstacles in the way of some of the very people who we need
most to attract to the UK to help us redefine our place in the world. Will the
Minister take the opportunity to state explicitly that MFL teachers,
translators and interpreters are highly skilled people who will not be screened
out by any new Immigration Rules on the basis of income or a blinkered
definition of what constitutes skill?
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