current students on courses at risk of closure would be supported<\/a> to complete their studies.<\/p>\nEmma Walkers, course leader for modern languages at Bilborough Sixth Form College in Nottingham, said there would be nowhere local for her students to study languages at university if the cuts went ahead.<\/p>\n
Publishing its new data tool, Hesa said the latest figures suggested that degree courses in French were no longer available to study in some locations, with student numbers now concentrated in London, Oxford, Bristol and Bath.<\/p>\n
But with an increasing number of students wanting to live at home and commute to university to limit the cost of their studies, Emma says some of her students are being left with nowhere to go.<\/p>\n
“Often, if a student is moving out of Nottingham, they’re going to end up moving to a more expensive city,” she said.<\/p>\n
“If you’re coming from a family which isn’t particularly well-off, to then try to go to London or Bath or Bristol is a huge amount of money to try and find.”<\/p>\n
She said the decline in student numbers for French and other language courses suggests languages are “just not valued at all”.<\/p>\n
Catherine Richards, principal at East Norfolk Sixth Form College, which sits in another area with relatively low student enrolment numbers in language courses, believes the issue begins long before university.<\/p>\n
“The challenge for places at higher education starts in primary school and the encouragement to do languages,” she says.<\/p>\n
She says schools in her region are offering fewer languages at GCSE, which leads to fewer pupils taking them at A-levels and then going on to study them at university.<\/p>\n
In German, she says course entry levels in schools and colleges across the county are so low “that it’s not a viable language anymore”.<\/p>\n
That’s a “pity” because of the “great teachers” across the county, she added.<\/p>\n
That sentiment is echoed by Prof Ren\u00e9 Koglbauer, former languages teacher and chair of trustees of the Association for Language Learning (ALL).<\/p>\n
He says there are concerns that in regions without language provision at a university level, schools and sixth form colleges could stop offering A-level language courses too.<\/p>\n
“If you then drop it at A-level, ultimately students may decide, ‘Well, if I can’t progress beyond GCSE, I’m not going to take that subject,'” he says.<\/p>\n
“You can see the downward spiral.”<\/p>\n
Many universities now offer “ab initio” undergraduate courses for languages, meaning you can start as a complete beginner – something Prof Koglbauer says has bolstered uptake.<\/p>\n
These intensive programmes, along with joint honours options and the introduction of non-European languages like Arabic and Mandarin, are part of the strategy to keep language learning popular for undergraduate students.<\/p>\n
But in order to solve the regional “cold spots”, Prof Koglbauer says universities may need to approach the issue differently.<\/p>\n
He says the sector may “need to think more about working collaboratively and actually pool resources together” to reach students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BBC News has reached out to the university for an update, but at the time a spokesperson said…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":318450,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-318449","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318449\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/318450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}