Call for easier Chinese exams

Mandarin is compulsory at Dr Seldon's former school, Brighton College

GCSEs and A-levels in Chinese need to be easier for children who do not speak the language at home, the head of a leading independent school says.

Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College, said it was important to encourage the study of Chinese so the UK could trade effectively with China.

But he said Mandarin learning would not flourish unless pupils were able to attain the highest grades.

The standard needed to be in line with languages such as Spanish and French.

Wellington College is hosting a one-day conference on Tuesday entitled Why all UK schools should be teaching Mandarin.

21st Century demands

Dr Seldon argues that the teaching of Mandarin should now take equal precedence with traditional European languages in British schools if the UK is to respond to the demands of the 21st rather than the 20th Century.

"If current and future generations of children do not have access to lessons in the main Chinese language, this will disadvantage the UK economically and culturally," he said.

"One will never fully understand the Chinese without some understanding of the language. Some British schools, in both sectors, are offering Mandarin already, but not nearly enough."

'Very hard'

But he felt the current standards in public examinations had to be reduced.

He said they were set at a level for Chinese native speakers rather than British children learning the language.

"At the moment schools are finding it very hard to get an A* or even an A at GCSE because the exams are geared too much to native speakers," he told the BBC News website.

Chinese is currently offered only by the Edexcel exam board.

On the face if it, the argument is not borne out by its results statistics.

At GCSE level, the proportion of candidates awarded an A* last year in French was just 8.1%. In Chinese it was 75.4%.

But Dr Seldon said those figures probably just proved his point - the corollary being that Chinese exams were too easy for those who spoke the language at home.

Changes

The evidence from schools was that the exams were far too hard for non-native speakers, he insisted.

The head of modern languages at Eton, Gerard Evans, said: "It's not true of Russian or even Japanese that a non-native speaker has a real disadvantage, but for whatever reason the grade thresholds in Chinese have been set too high."

Chinese at Eton is an option outside the normal timetable, taken by about 90 or 100 boys.

They are in mixed classes based on ability, which might see 13-year-olds alongside 18-year-olds. And because they are doing it out of interest, they do not necessarily sit exams.

But Mr Evans said that when they did, those who might be predicted to get a top grade in another language would not be in the same position with Chinese.

It was noticeable that the exam board did seem to have eased the grades in recent years, but he felt more needed to be done.

There might even be a case for having different exams for native and non-native speakers, he said.

A spokeswoman for Edexcel said the Chinese syllabus had been revamped to take account of the fact that more non-native speakers were taking it as an option.

And she said the board had worked with the British Council on resources for teachers.

"We do have more schools wanting to deliver it, and not necessarily independent schools," she said.