THE GUARDIAN: Education secretary outlines plans ahead of Tory conference, including extension of school day and tougher truancy fines
The education secretary, Michael Gove, has proposed that every child aged five or over should be learning a foreign language, and promised to "pull every lever", including encouraging longer school days, to make it happen.
In a pre-Conservative conference interview, he says: "There is a slam-dunk case for extending foreign language teaching to children aged five.
"Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign languages, and we just need to speak louder in English. It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning." » | Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt | Friday, September 30, 2011
THE GUARDIAN: Conservative conference: Gove spells out next step on his agenda for schools: Education secretary talks to the Guardian about his proposals for teaching modern languages and denies free schools are elitist » | Nicholas Watt and Patrick Wintour | Friday, September 30, 2011
