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Leading UK universities are looking together in their language courses to prevent department closures due to a sharp fall in the number of young people studying the subjects.
The N8 Consortium of the President of Research Universities In the north of England, including Durham, Lancaster, Manchester and Newctarle, there are discussions about the resources and best practices of funding students.
Professor Nigel Harkness, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Newcastle University, speaks of financial periods that a modern institutions emphasize a country management of the subject of UK universities.
“Is this a role we want to collectively keep our region?” asked harkness, professor of French at university. “What does the practical collaboration look like?”
An education officer is higher saying it says even members of the Russell Group of universities who are primarily in the ranks “thought they needed to share courses in languages so that they should be shared”.
One said the pressure of language departments is such “even in Russell Group (institutions), search courses to find their own solutions”.
The Harkness said about the helping N8: “At one end of the scale, you can share the best practice of teaching – for example, how expiring is one way.”.
Changes, in part is the result of a lack of language teachers, can result in university staff teaching institutions and even closing some departments when united.
UK applications for undergraduate language degree fall, more than one fifth from 2019 to 2025, according to data from the university admissions service. This is contrary to the total number of applications, with 10 percent at the same time.
Many universities surrounded their language offerings in recent years as a result of financial pressures, including Aberdeen, Coventry and Lincoln. Cardiff University Deals plans to raise degrees in language language after a backlash, but still plans To cut the number of staff and students as part of the more stressful structure.
Hetan Shah, Price Executive of the British Academy, the UK’s national academy for human and social sciences with additional conversations in the region of how they provide students with students “.
But he believes that the larger and “higher question is, what languages do we need to need the national provision, and how is it protected?
“For example it can be geopolitically unwise to find our own incompetent speakers in Russia or Chinese. While it’s easy to turn off the tap, it’s harder to turn it off, so hard to turn it off, so hard to turn it off.”
The FT was previously reported by the continuing decrease in young people in England languages, with mad data showing a sharp candidates a year for German and French. This suggests general entries for summer surveys in foreign languages falling 1.5 percent last year.
Fewer than 3 percent of A-lests entries for summer examples of 2025 in England are in foreign languages, data from examinations of exam exams.
It has a knocking effect of universities, with undergraduate and place enrollments in the area 20 percent in five years, according to a report published by an educational policy, a looked tank.
The report is found the number of levels obtained in the UK in the previous year’s physical education is higher than French, German and classical languages united. It is blamed by a lack of eligible language teachers and the decision that Tony Blair’s Government’s has been made in 2004 to scrap the requirement for young people to study a language of up to 16.
Confirmed by the University of Manchester as a member of the N8 this “working collectively to meet challenges facing the challenges facing language provision of higher education”.
Professor Caron Caron Generry, the leader of New School at Lancaster University, said languages “, while increasing the” looking for new ways of teaching “subject.