The declining fortunes of languages in schools have been causing concern for decades - as far back as 2007, the Dearing review was addressing the sharp fall in numbers after languages were made optional at key stage 4.
Analysis of 2026 national entries data, however, reveals a trend that goes against that prevailing narrative: the rise of “other modern languages”, which Tes has been told is a source of “huge, untapped potential” in schools.
What exactly this category comprises can change from year to year, but Ofqual has provided Tes with the languages included in the 2026 data: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Greek, Gujarati, Italian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Panjabi, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish and Urdu.
It has already been well documented that the rise of Spanish has counteracted the decline of the two traditional mainstays of languages teaching in the UK, French and German.
Less well known, however, is the rise, since the Covid pandemic, of other modern languages - and this often refers to the language a pupil speaks at home.
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