CILT is a partner in a high profile new campaign to promote the value of languages and language learning in the UK. The Speak to the Future campaign launched in February 2011 will make the case for a long-term commitment to achieving an improvement in the UK’s capacity in languages.

The five-year campaign is addressed to policy makers and leaders in education and business and will provide evidence of the importance of languages for the UK’s political influence and economic success. It will also gather evidence of the cognitive, social and career benefits of language learning for individuals.

Speak to the Future has five key objectives:

1. every language should be valued as an asset

2. all children to have a coherent experience of languages

3. every child leaving secondary school with a basic working knowledge of at least two languages including English

4. every graduate should be qualified in a second language and 

5. an increase in the number of highly qualified linguists.

Richard Hardie, Chair of UBS Ltd and The Learning Trust, who addressed the launch, said:

‘Successive governments’ enthusiasm for globalisation - removing barriers to free trade, free flows of capital... has been unbounded.  But in spite of all this, we fail time and again to invest seriously in linguists’. 

Richard Hardie's speech in full (Word doc, 39KB)

Alongside CILT, key partners in the campaign include the Language Alliance, the Language Company, the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies and the University Council of Modern Languages. More than 30 other organisations are already involved in the campaign, which hopes to draw in support from across a broad spectrum of interests in order to take its message that languages are not merely important, but vital to our nation’s future, to the widest possible public.

For more information, see the Speak to the Future website: http://www.speaktothefuture.org/