10 September 2025. A new Coalition for Language Education?
A new Coalition for Language Education?
The Curriculum & Assessment Review is sparking debate about the place of languages in our education system and prompting new conversations - and coalitions - to take place.
By Prof Ben Rampton, Kings College London
There is a very general feeling that in England, education 5-19 needs to change, and in July 2024, the new Labour government set up a Curriculum & Assessment Review. The Review sets out ‘to refresh the curriculum to ensure it is cutting edge, fit for purpose and meeting the needs of children and young people to support their future life and work’ and it accepts the need to take ‘the issues and diversities of our society’ on board. A lot of different language associations have now written to the Review Committee, and they recognise that this is all very relevant to language education too.
So for example, referring to modern languages, ALL endorses a ‘strategic commitment of a multilingual language policy’ but speaks of ‘the problem of pupils’ attitude towards language’ and ‘the lack of investment in… training of primary teachers for languages’. For English as an additional language at school, NALDIC calls for recognition of ‘the range of languages used in the daily lives of children and young people from a range of different backgrounds’, but among other things, criticises the ‘lack[.. of] any specific mention of EAL learners’ in the specifications for Initial Teacher Education. In 16-19 education, NATECLA stresses that the needs of ESOL learners ‘are often overlooked because they are so different from the large majority of school and college students’; for subject English, NATE notes that nowadays ‘cultural fluidity [is] as important as social mobility’ and that ‘young people [need] to discuss difference, divergence and conflict in terms other than those they may encounter in mainstream and social media’; on literacy, UKLA writes of the ‘urgent need… for a more culturally relevant curriculum’ ‘embracing the richness and diversity of our learners’; the British Academy suggests that the ‘commitment to a broad and balanced national curriculum on paper… does not reflect the languages education many young people receive up and down the country’; and many of these and other submissions stress the need to attend much more closely to home, heritage and community languages.
Modern languages. EAL. ESOL 16-19. Subject English. Literacy education. HHCLs.
Yes, there are some differences in the particular priorities that these submissions emphasise, but overall, they have a great deal in common (and you can see much more of this in our detailed overview of the submissions from 19 different organisations/associations). So let’s hope that the Review and then the DFE respond positively to the very high level of consensus that they evidence. But do we just leave it at that? Go back into our separate boxes and wait to see whether or not government moves towards the broadly shared vision of language development and linguistic diversity that has now emerged so clearly?
Our new Coalition for Language Education believes that that’d be a mistake, and that this is an important moment for de-siloed thinking. We want to press further with the question: Is there actually more that unites English, EAL, EAP, ESOL, modern, classical and community languages than divides them? Central government matters a great deal, but policy is never just a decision taken at the top that then flows smoothly down a ‘delivery system’. On the contrary, there are lots of ‘policy actors’ at different levels – schools, teachers, students, local communities, local governments, universities, and teacher associations themselves – and it is likely to need a lot of cross-sectoral conversation if we are going to figure out what a broader and more integrated vision might mean for classrooms, for the curriculum, and for the ways in which language education is divided up and organised.
A new Coalition
To help build these conversations, we formed the Coalition in autumn 2023, and came up with six guiding tenets and tasks. You can see our Founding Statement here, and the principles are (very briefly):
- Recognise the richness of language in our lives
- Accept linguistic diversity
- Engage with social and cultural change
- Respect the complexity of classrooms
- Build partnerships
- Draw on universities.
Following on from these, we said we’d aim to ‘Identify collective problems’, ‘Take action on policy’, ‘Reinvigorate models of language for education’, ‘Engage with linguistic stratification & diversity’, ‘Probe traditional boundaries’ and ‘Support language teachers & professionals, enriching teacher education’. A lot of groups and individuals have signed up to this statement, and we have been pursuing this mission with a website, at on-line and in-person events and conferences, in working papers, in academic and professional journals, and indeed in work focused on the DfE’s Curriculum & Assessment Review.
But really? Aren’t there already a number of organisations supporting a re-think across different fields of language education policy – the British Academy, for example, or the Committee on Linguistics in Education? Aren’t the existing language associations themselves internally diverse? Isn’t the landscape of language education already well-populated with a lot of very active and very effective bodies?
‘Yes’ is the answer to all three questions.
Even so, we’ve been finding that at the events, presentations and collaborative tasks we’ve organised, the interaction between people in different branches of language education generates a lot of positive energy and a strengthened sense of possibility. For as long as this is happening, the Coalition’s got value. The six tenets give it overall purpose, and feed into our main activity: learning from each other what ‘Recognising the richness of language in our lives’, or ‘Build partnerships’, can mean in different parts of language education. We’ve no five-year plan, and if and when this kind of energising cross-sectoral dialogue beds down in other places, the Coalition can disperse. But that’s not yet.
Find out more
You can find out more about what we’ve been doing at www.coalitionforlanguageducationuk.com, and we’ve an article in a special issue of the Language Learning Journal on language policy. For spring 2026, we’re working on a conference about cities and regions as sites for connection, and here is the place to go if you’d like to join us. We very much hope you’ll do so.