Language courses missing from most lower-tariff universities

Less than a third of lower-tariff universities in England now offer languages degrees, raising concerns that growing provision “cold spots” are likely to impact the most disadvantaged.

Analysis by the founder of the Widening Participation Languages Network, Becky Muradás-Taylor, shows that students can take a languages course at just 22 of the 73 universities (30 per cent) with entry requirements below AAB at A level after a spate of cuts in recent years.

This is causing growing cold spots – areas where people would need to travel more than 60km to study for their chosen course – in the north, the east and the south-west of England, according to the results of the study, published in The Language Learning Journal on 20 October.

Muradás-Taylor, a professor of languages and linguistics at the University of Leeds, said she considers the lack of provision to be a “social justice issue”.

“I worked at York St John University for several years, which is a lower-tariff university,” she said. “The students that come to study often have overcome various battles through their school lives, perhaps have left school with not the best qualifications, and have come back in later and had another go and then got into university…For those students, language study was absolutely transformational.”

Language learning at university has long been in decline, in part because of a lack of a pipeline from earlier levels of study. Muradás-Taylor’s report highlights that only about 40 per cent of people study languages after the age of 14.

Muradás-Taylor set out to individually track the 10 most widely taught languages at universities in England – Arabic, Chinese, Classics (ancient Greek and Latin), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish – plus British Sign Language (BSL) and Korean.

Between 2023 and 2026, three universities stopped offering language degrees altogether. These were the University of Leicester, Middlesex University and Northumbria University.

The University of Nottingham, one of the largest providers of modern language degrees in the country, has come under fire in recent weeks amid news that it would axe its language courses but will still offer Classics.

The main black spots uncovered by the research were in the south-west, for BSL, Japanese and Korean, and in the Midlands, for Arabic and Japanese. For lower-tariff universities, there is a clustering of options in the south-east for studying German and Italian, but the north-east has very poor provision, and there are no institutions offering these languages in the south-west.

Lower-tariff universities that continue to offer languages, the report notes, include the universities of Chester, Kent, Lancashire, London Metropolitan, Royal Holloway, Sheffield Hallam, Westminster, Wolverhampton and York St John.

One of the issues that Muradás-Taylor uncovered was that it was not always clear which universities offered language options as part of degree programmes, in combination with other subjects.

A key recommendation of her report is, therefore, that university marketing teams “make clear” what language degree programmes are possible, and to make such courses “more findable” online.

She also suggests that the government create a small fund for lower-tariff universities to ensure that language provision is spread more equitably across the country.

Asked what this might cost, the researcher said: “It feels to me like in terms of the scale of investment the government does generally in higher education, it’s a tiny pot of money that would be needed that universities could be invited to apply for if they were interested in opening language programmes and they were already in cold spots.”

She criticised the “unhelpful” narrative within the sector that “languages are very expensive to teach”, suggesting that streamlined courses of the kind she had helped to design at York St John were possible.

“I’m really hoping that these maps and the details of them will be useful for people working in universities who are campaigning against [course] closures,” Muradás-Taylor added, “or in a more positive way, [for those] who are saying, ‘How about we consider opening a programme here because there’s a gap in that area?’”

georgia.luckhurst@timeshighereducation.com