Sometimes even linguists have to rely on clichés. As the former director of CILT Cymru, the national centre for languages in Wales, my sporting cliché of choice would be that of the tightrope walker. Funded by the Welsh government on an annual basis since 2002 and with an excellent reputation for our work with schools and their pupils, we have been staring into the abyss for the past five years. Mass redundancy notices have become a perennial hazard. So when I was told in January of this year that our funding was being cut and that I, along with a number of my colleagues, were being made redundant, it felt like I was in freefall.
I passed through a range of emotions after hearing the decision. My first reaction was actually one of relief. The worst had happened and as Boris Becker famously said when he lost a Wimbledon final, "nobody died out there!" But as I turfed out 20 years' work from my filing cabinets and re-read old strategy documents and speeches of support for modern foreign languages (MFL) and CILT Cymru by Welsh ministers of education, I was overcome by feelings of anger. We had tried so many innovative ways of increasing MFL take-up, from national Spelling Bees to Business Language Champions, Triple Literacy projects and Compact schemes with schools and local authorities. All had been successful in their own ways, but without strong strategic support from Welsh government we could only slow down the decline in MFL and were powerless to reverse it.
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