It is 3.30pm and a dozen little boys in long shorts, blue check shirts and ties are sitting around tables in a London schoolroom that is decked out with typical infant-class paraphernalia — alphabet charts, winter-themed paintings, and posters of healthy foodstuffs. On the teacher’s instruction, the four-year-olds close their eyes, then open them on command to describe a scene drawn on the back of a paper plate. The picture is unremarkable — a stick figure dancing around to a stereo — but the words cheerfully shouted by the pupils are something of a shock in the middle of Kensington: every one of the boys calls out ‘My mother is listening to music!” in perfect Chinese.
The scene, at Hawkesdown House preparatory school, is increasingly common in classrooms around the UK and not just in the sort of establishment where the children wear ties, caps and matching gabardines. In the most deprived inner-city boroughs and in rural areas where Chinese faces are few and far between, as well as in the cloisters of Eton and other top private schools, Mandarin is taking off. Katharine Carruthers, Chinese networks coordinator for the UK’s Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, says interest has gone ‘from busy last academic year to manic. It is terribly exciting”.
It is not only school-age children who are getting caught up in the Mandarin rush. A handful of British parents are following the example of zealous New Yorkers and hiring Mandarin-speaking nannies to give their infants the ultimate head start. At the other end of the scale, the language, with its chime bar-like patterns of tones and beautiful but, to Westerners, initially incomprehensible script, is being wrestled with in universities and adult learning centres as never before.
Magdalena Corso, collecting her son Oliver (4), from Hawkesdown House after his Chinese lesson, says she first sent him to a weekend Chinese club at three, and plans to do the same with her two younger children. ‘Just looking at how the world is changing, the economic impact of China in the future, you can’t start early enough with children. And he loves it: it’s his secret world that I can’t understand,” she says.
Is the current cult of Mandarin merely a passing fashion, or might the subject reinvigorate language learning in this country, as some people predict? Can a nation that struggles to ask for ‘un verre de vin rouge” really master a language that requires a knowledge of 2 500 characters just for daily use?
The trouble with trying to gauge the growth of the official Chinese language in the UK is that this new-found interest has rather caught the Blair government unawares, and few accurate figures exist on who is learning it and where. A survey of schools conducted last autumn by CiLT, the national centre for languages, found that out of the 1 500 secondary schools that responded, 38 — approaching 2.5% — were teaching Chinese to pupils aged 14 to 16. Most respondents said the subject had been introduced in the past three years, suggesting that things are changing fast. Indeed the latest department for education and skills estimate is that more than 80 secondaries and a small number of primaries are now offering Mandarin.
Another CiLT survey found that part of the pressure to learn Chinese is coming from employers: global companies are keen that schools should give up on French and German and teach Mandarin, Spanish and Arabic instead. And businesses want graduates who understand not only the language, but the culture, as they attempt to penetrate Chinese markets.
The Chinese government is also doing its bit to promote Mandarin. New Confucius Institutes — modelled on the Goethe Institute, British Council and Academie Francaise — are springing up worldwide to support the teaching of Chinese language and culture, with six now open or in the pipeline in Britain, including one based within London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
Theresa Tinsley of CiLT suggests British high school students, in particular, may be attracted by ‘the lure of the new” — the chance to study a subject they have not covered earlier and do not view with weary familiarity. The chance to combine some language learning with Chinese studies or even other subjects also appeals to some pupils, she adds: one Dudley secondary school has tempted students to sign up for Mandarin and business studies after they showed little enthusiasm for French.
The possibility, too, of trips to China, including growing numbers of language immersion courses part-funded by the British Council, are also for many a more attractive option than the traditional school exchange spent trailing a mismatched penfriend around Lille or Cologne.
Lincoln Christ’s Hospital school, a specialist language college in Lincoln, benefits from strong links with a school in Tangshan, a city south of Beijing. Nick Brown, its head of languages and a passionate advocate of the opportunities provided by language learning for those who may have few advantages in life, says that the school now offers Mandarin to all pupils other than year sevens (who take a modern European language on entry to the school). Around 40 are currently studying the subject, either in curriculum lessons, at lunchtime or after school.
Despite the growing enthusiasm for Mandarin in the UK, however, significant barriers remain. There are too many institutions chasing, at present, too few teachers, and teaching materials remain far less developed than for other languages. In many state schools, languages have been wound down to little more than a token presence on the curriculum and it will take great efforts and financial commitment to restart them.
Those who are already converted, though, are basking in the spotlight that is suddenly shining on their subject. Katharine Carruthers says that many state primary schools now band together to share Mandarin teachers, who she says have a ‘missionary zeal” for their subject. ‘I would be thrilled to bits if it became a core language in the UK, but it should certainly be taught as a main curriculum subject,” she says. ‘I feel the anecdotal evidence and the level of interest mean it is definitely here to stay.” —