UK students are failing industry

With the final countdown to the publication of this year's A Level results underway, CBI chief Sir Digby Jones has expressed alarm at the number of A Level students turning their back on science and foreign languages.

And just one in 25 students study a modern language at A Level with very few studying those needed by business in the increasingly globalised world, such as Mandarin, Russian or Spanish. Schools are also no longer required to offer a language subject while in Europe pupils study two foreign languages for at least a year.

The number of 16 to 18-year-olds studying a language A Level decreased by a fifth between 1999 and 2004 with German and French down 34 and 30 per cent respectively. Last year just 451 people in England and Wales took A Level Russian, 1,677 studied Chinese and 4,650 learned Spanish.