Infants may be offered foreign language classes

Children are to be taught a foreign language from primary one, learning minister Alasdair Allan has announced.

At the moment most youngsters start learning languages when they are in primary six.

The Scottish Government is now looking at having languages taught in the first year of formal education. Children could then start to learn a second one in primary five. A pilot could be run in a number of primary schools in the 2012-13 school year.

The Scottish Government currently provides councils with £4 million a year to support the teaching of modern languages.

Under the new plan, Scotland’s National Centre for Languages will receive £600,000 over 2012-13 to support language learning, with a fifth of this cash for pilots to explore how teaching could begin from P1.

The recommendation that children start learning languages from then was made in a report by the Modern Languages Working Group.