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Language learning is an EU priority, Androulla Vassiliou, EU commissioner for education, culture and multilingualism, has said. Launching the revamped Erasmus+ programme, Vassiliou said languages are essential for addressing unemployment and social mobility within the European Union.
"Languages are one of our six priority topics under Erasmus+," Vassiliou said. "Whether it is for mobility for language learning, partnerships between institutions for language teaching, or policy support, it is one of our priorities."
The Erasmus+ programme will provide grants for more than four million people across the EU to study or train abroad. It comes into force in January 2014 and aims to address the language skills deficit holding back young people from international jobs.
"People in the UK think that as far as they are concerned, they can travel anywhere and can communicate with anybody in English so why should they learn another language?" Vassiliou said. "But this is not the case."
Vassiliou said this thinking is having a knock-on effect in the business sector, where a lack of language knowledge is affecting trade. "Studies show that companies that had a language strategy were able to increase their business by 25%. And at the other end of the scale, those who didn't pay any attention to languages, lost 11% of their business."
The €15b budget for the Erasmus+ programme comes as the overall EU budget was reduced for the first time in the Union's history. "Although the budget for EU for the next seven years is reduced, one of the very few programmes that got an increase is our Erasmus+ programme which got a 40% increase compared to the present one," Vassiliou said.
Erasmus+ will tidy up the existing programmes currently on offer for foreign study. It replaces the Lifelong Learning Programme, Youth in Action, Erasmus Mundus, Tempus, Alfa and Edulink. "People didn't know exactly under which programme they should apply and it made things complicated because there were different rules for each programme," Vassiliou said. "Now everything will be under this same umbrella."
Nearly 40,000 British citizens currently receive grants from these EU schemes to study, train and volunteer abroad, compared to 83,000 a year in Germany and over 70,000 in both France and Spain.
David Willetts, the minister for universities, has offered his support for the initiative. Vassiliou recently met with Willetts and said he gave her: "a very positive signal about how keen he is to promote Erasmus+ in the UK."
The programme will introduce a new master's loan facility that will make it possible for young people to go abroad for a full master's course by obtaining an EU-guaranteed bank loan.
The UK is also losing influence within the European Commission itself because of poor language skills. Despite UK nationals making up 12% of the population of the EU, this is not reflected in its participation in the Commission. "Only 6% of the EU staff are made up of UK nationals, and now the situation is getting even worse because only 2% of those who applied for a job are of UK origin," Vassiliou said.
The reason for these low staff numbers is that to apply for a job in the Commission, applicants must have knowledge of two foreign languages in addition to their mother tongue.
Vassiliou hopes the UK will address this in part through an EU benchmark for all its citizens to speak two foreign languages. The UK is currently, however, still far off reaching this target.
"It's a very gloomy picture. Here in the UK only 9% of the 15-year-olds are able to communicate freely in the first additional foreign language, which is French. In Sweden, 82% of the 15-year-olds were proficient in the first language, which is English."
Vassiliou is currently drafting a benchmark for languages that she hopes will be adopted by the European Council in 2014. "The benchmark will make it necessary for 50% of 15-year-olds to be able to communicate freely in the first language. And 75% of young people of that age will be learning two languages."
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