Plans to cut Asset Language exams to 5 languages (French, German, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin)

"OCR plans to reduce its Asset Languages assessment scheme from 25 to only 5 languages (French, German, Spanish, Italian and Mandarin) from 2014. This has been in part as a result of government policy not to recognise Asset Languages as contributing towards the English Baccalaureate and therefore school performance indicators. This decision will leave many languages and language learners without accreditation in the UK. (See http://www.ocr.org.uk/news/2012/item_043.aspx for more information) - http://www.change.org/petitions/keep-our-languages-exams-every-lang...

THIS IS A RETROGRADE MOVE. For example, it is not so long ago that Mandarin was regarded as a 'community language' rather than a 'modern foreign language'. There was a huge difference between the two, not least in the provision of teacher-training. It was almost impossible to do teacher-training in a 'community language' unless you were from that community. The result was that there were very few qualified teachers of 'community languages', which in turn restricted the teaching of those languages, and the take-up of those languages. The community languages were not considered mainstream and therefore had a different status, which was all too easily misunderstood as a status of being somehow lower, stranger, more difficult, more remote.