Back in the day – ie the 1970s – it was believed that come the early part of the 21st Century, we’d be taking tablets for food, flying in inter-galactic spaceships and hopping to work by jetpacks.

It was also believed that our ‘off-piste’ way of learning languages would all be solved and we’d be fluent in much more than pigeon French.

“It was the future”, we were told, though come 2022, we’re probably further behind in language learning than we were in those halcyon days and, if anything, fewer languages are taught in schools.

Looking at the stats, the first thing of note is that GCSE Spanish and French are almost neck and neck in uptake in Northern Ireland, with the Iberians winning it by a nose ... or is that a ‘nariz’?

In the most recent statistics, in last June’s exams, 3,838 students took Spanish and 3,567 sat French.

Within this, Spanish had an increase of 255 students from the previous year, while the numbers taking French fell by 114.

As for German, its numbers are in sharp decline, with the subject almost exclusively only being on the options forms in grammar schools.

In 2021, just 692 students did the subject – a big fall from 835 the previous year. The omens are not good.

For all the promotion Irish gets as a subject within the CCMS and some voluntary grammar sectors, only 1,757 students did GCSE in it last year, a tiny fall from 2020.

However, almost 60 per cent got A*/A grades, while 46 – 47 per cent of pupils doing French, Spanish and German got the same grade.

In Wales, a country with a population half as big again as NI, Welsh as a second language is spectacularly more popular, with almost 26,000 students opting for it.

That would be the equivalent of around 17,500 pro rata – 10 times more than study Irish for GCSE here.

Of the other languages on offer, Polish (as a first language) is anecdotally the next most popular language GCSE in NI, though as an exam subject it is predominantly offered only to native speakers, as are the other less popular languages, such as Italian, Russian, Chinese, Welsh, Dutch and so on.

Last year, 121 students took such GCSEs, almost half than the previous year, and all these languages are offered by bodies such as AQA, OCR and EdExcel; CCEA just offer Spanish, French, German and Irish – even Latin has gone.

A-Level stats aren’t as interesting in a discussion like this; you can’t do A-Level Spanish, for example, without having done it for GCSE, so one can only comment on the amount of students whose GCSE results include a language, and such data is not singularly available, at least from CCEA.

On a general note, A-level numbers of those doing Spanish, French and German mirror the trend in GCSE, and interestingly, the same is true across the UK.

Again, looking at the overall picture, the number of students opting for any language in NI remains fairly stable, at around 10,000 students.

So what’s the reason for this decline, or at least the lack of growth?

Arguably, the biggest reason is that schools themselves have not believed enough in their own students and have ‘sold’ languages as being difficult.

Instead, their students have been shoe-horned into GCSE options that sound as though it makes them employable, or simply just have cool-sounding titles like ‘Child Development’, ‘Journalism’, ‘Leisure, Travel and Tourism’ and ‘Moving Image Arts’.

These aren’t my thoughts, but the views of other language teachers who are adamant that schools assume mid-grade and weaker pupils will under-achieve in languages.

True, it is difficult to speak a foreign language fluently, but GCSE just requires you to be on that journey, not at the end of it.

This suggests that, together with a very topic-based approach, and publicly-available vocabulary lists, surely languages are not totally the bogeyman in the qualification cupboard?

Another reason for the decline in languages is possibly good old Covid-19.

During this period, a small but significant number of students may have opted for subjects which can be studied (to some degree) independently.

Languages almost certainly needs more tutor intervention than some other subjects, but whether or not that is true is irrelevant – it’s the perception among parents, and probably that is enough to account for recent decline in numbers.

STEM, or the promotion of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, also takes its toll on other subjects being chosen for GCSEs.

There’s a huge raft of support to encourage students to attain in these subjects, and rightly so, if we want a future science and engineering sector in the future.

However, I’m sure languages, arts and other subjects would just love a seat at that table; it’s ironic that subjects that are seen as the most vocational need so much propping up.

Teachers I spoke to about writing this article also spoke of inconsistencies of marking at GCSE, especially between French and German.

Although conversations were animated about this topic, I have no empirical evidence on this area, so I’ll leave it at that.

At the other end of the age range, there’s not much support coming from primary schools across the province.

A combined high-pressure primary curriculum as well as a lack of funding means that it is piecemeal what primary schools can do in terms of language learning.

To put it simply, there are extremely few language specialists in the primary sector, so almost every student who starts languages in Year 8, is doing so from scratch.

This means most other subjects have a ‘heads-up’; another factor.

One other blue-sky thinking thought. As principals are paid according to the amount of children in their schools, consequently, they will want the best set of results they can get.

Because of that, it’s entirely plausible they will go down the path of least resistance.

GCSE Performing Arts is much easier to sell than German, for example; so in this respect, subjects that need a bit of a ‘leg up’ will go to the wayside as principals can then apply for larger schools with their 98 per cent A* - C stat polished and shining on their CV.

At the end of the day, the system in NI is designed in such a way that some elements are open to conflicts of interests.