Policy tug of war: EBacc, progress 8 and modern foreign languages in England

Abstract

Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) as a secondary school subject is affected by two policies, namely the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) and Progress 8, which contribute to the measurement of performance in exams at age 16 (GCSEs). In this paper, I discuss the concept of performance measurement in schools and the purpose it purportedly serves, before outlining these two policies and considering how they contribute to the culture of performance measurement and a non-neutral discourse around ‘standards’. I argue that the two policies act in tension in a game of tug of war with one another in such a way that the net positive effect on the subject of MFL is zero, but that the negative effect on students is substantial. I suggest that the policies act to impose middle-class notions of what it means to be educated on students, with a substantial negative effect on students from low socio-economic status backgrounds both in terms of their interest in the subject and their perceptions of their own value within the education system.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Parrish, A. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2458-172X
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2024 The Authors. Except as otherwise noted, this author-accepted version of a journal article published in Journal of Education Policy is made available via the University of Sheffield Research Publications and Copyright Policy under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Keywords:	Modern foreign languages; secondary education; EBacc; Progress 8; performance measurement
Dates:	Submitted: 15 August 2023 Accepted: 4 March 2024 Published (online): 14 March 2024 Published: 14 March 2024
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > School of Education (Sheffield)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	15 Mar 2024 13:13
Last Modified:	19 Apr 2024 14:55
Status:	Published online
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2024.2328625

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Policy tug of war: EBacc, progress 8 and modern foreign languages in England

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