“Now, Gary, repeat after me: Quiero una margarita, por favor,” my Spanish tutor instructs. I cringe at the butchered Spanglish my estuary accent produces. Like Del Boy Trotter ordering a cocktail: “Key – yeah – row oon margari’a, pour far four.”
It’s 2023, I’m 41, living in Argentina and battling the frustration and disempowerment of learning a new language at this age, longing for my elastic 11-year-old brain over this husked-out mush. I’m also wishing, for the umpteenth time, that I was taught Spanish instead of French at school.
Not to throw shade on French: it’s a beautiful language, and I studied it until my first year at university. I even worked in Nice for three summers. But Spanish would have really set me up for life – and that is even more true for today’s students. Yet we are still teaching far more of our youngest students French than Spanish. It’s outdated. Partly, it’s a simple numbers game. Spanish is the world’s second-most-spoken first language – 484 million speakers. French is 22nd, with just 74 million native speakers. Spanish wipes the floor with French for overall speakers, too.
Logically, we should teach French to half as many students of compulsory schooling age as we do Spanish, which would come close to matching the proportion of speakers of each worldwide. We are nowhere near those numbers yet – meaning we are failing to best prepare our students for modern-world realities.
The numbers alone, though, haven’t persuaded those responsible for Britain’s education system to change the curriculum at anything more than a glacial pace. As of 2025, French was offered in about 70% of England’s primary schools, with Spanish in just 26%. French is the most offered language at key stage 3 (ages 11-14). It is also dominant at GCSE level: last year, 90% of schools offered French to GCSE, while 76% offered Spanish.
The interesting trend is what students are choosing. In August last year, Spanish became the most popular language GCSE in England for the first time, with more than 136,000 entries. French was still just behind with just under 133,000 entries. It suggests pupils are ahead of education professionals with their thinking. It’s a trend we should rapidly accelerate. Imagine how much higher that Spanish GCSE entry rate could have been if at least an equal number of schools offered Spanish as French.
Prominent language-learning experts agree that the younger you begin, the better. A developmental psychology lecturer, Dr Eleonore Smalle, recently told the UN that learning a new language becomes harder from about age 12. Before then, children learn language unconsciously: through passive exposure without awareness of what they are learning, but it sticks.
We should tell young people the pros and cons to learning each, and be frank with them about the utility of Spanish. It goes beyond the numbers. In terms of employability, cultural cachet and future exciting post-Brexit travel opportunities as potential “digital nomads”, Spanish will serve Britain’s students better than French.
If someone had told me that by learning Spanish early I could remote-work my way across Latin America and learn to salsa with guapo men in nightclubs, I would have had an exciting incentive. Although I worked as a freelance journalist in Argentina, then Medellín in Colombia for a few years, I constantly struggled with my embarrassing Spanglish.
While British students notoriously groan at foreign language learning, the increasing confidence of Latino culture might persuade them. In Medellín, the sounds of locals Karol G and Maluma echo across its hilly comunas. On Sunday, Bad Bunny became the first Spanish-language artist to headline the Super Bowl half-time show. Hispanic music more broadly is having a moment, evidenced by the popularity of today’s boldest creative artist, Rosalía. Learning Spanish has never been cooler.
By still mostly defaulting to French, schools cling to a past that prizes France’s proximity and erstwhile nobility. Of course, it isn’t either/or. There are still solid reasons to speak French; it is (along with English) the language of the Olympics and the UN, and, most importantly, Céline Dion’s mother tongue.
But working-class families such as mine holiday in Benidorm or Lanzarote, not in luxurious Cannes or Monaco, or on the expensive boulevards of Paris. We are more likely to become holiday reps in Magaluf than ski instructors in the Alps. Emerging digital nomad hubs are in Spanish-speaking affordable cities such as Medellín or buzzy ones such as Buenos Aires.
Modern foreign-language uptake has declined in recent years; it’s crucial our students are offered the chance to study, and the information they need to choose their language wisely if they are to become global citizens.
Two years after nervously ordering that margarita in Spanglish, I can now ask to peruse a wine list (malbec, malbec or malbec?) in almost-correct Spanish. I still sound like Del Boy, but I’m understood in 20 different countries. Que rico.
