In my earlier article, I looked at the new proposals for dealing with school exclusions set out in The Importance of Teaching schools White Paper, published by the government last month. Two other areas of concern in Paper, which otherwise contains some good ideas, relates to the curriculum changes and the measurement of schools’ performance.

Curriculum – the broad academic core

The White Paper gives some welcome attention to the breadth of the curriculum students study. Although the freedoms proposed for schools elsewhere in the paper allow them to adopt their own route, it is proposed to encourage the uptake of GCSEs in sciences, languages and humanities by awarding an ‘English Baccalaureate’ to any student who achieves good passes in English, mathematics, the sciences, a modern or ancient foreign language and a humanity such as history or geography. (Though why they don’t just go the whole hog and adopt the Tomlinson proposals will have to be the subject of an article another day).

The devil is in the detail, however! In an addendum to the published White Paper, the government set out which subjects will be allowable for inclusion in the EB. There will be many arguments about which subjects should be included, but I want to draw attention to the languages problem.

In the list, the only non-European languages included are Biblical Hebrew and Hindi, and the only European languages are Welsh, Classical Greek, Latin and French!

Further clarifications from the DfE have indicated that Spanish, German and possibly Urdu might join the list, but that could be it. What about Italian, Russian, Mandarin, Portuguese, Arabic, Tamil, Vietnamese, Pashto, Yorubu, Ibo, Hausa, Swahili, Persian and many others?

All these languages and more are spoken in families and schools around the country – in secondary school where I’m a governor, where white British students comprise only half the roll, over thirty languages are in common use. These are modern languages in use in the world, and for many of them GCSEs are available, so why are they not included in the EB lists?

Given our country’s international outlook, we should be encouraging students to learn Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish and Urdu. A few more Pashto speakers would have been handy in Afghanistan, and engaging with our Commonwealth colleagues would be a lot easier if we spoke some of their languages!

It’s true that GCSEs in these languages are often taken by native or second language speakers as an ‘easy’ qualification. Schools encourage them to do so, partly because progress in it can give a boost to those students’ confidence in their other subjects.

If it is academic rigour which is the concern, however, then we should seek to bar all native or second-language speakers from taking qualifications in their languages, and not just speakers of non-European languages. To do otherwise starts to look just a little like discrimination.

Alex Feakes is a Liberal Democrat councillor in Forest Hill, southeast London and a governor of a girls’ community secondary school. He blogs at www.alexfeakes.org and is on twitter.