All secondary school pupils in England should have the chance to learn a less familiar language such as Mandarin, says Children’s Secretary Ed Balls.
Mandarin has become increasingly popular in schools – with one in seven now teaching the subject.
Making it more widely available is an “aspiration” rather than a pledge – and could mean schools and colleges sharing specialist language teaching staff.
Mr Balls highlighted the economic importance of learning languages.
As well as Mandarin, he pointed to the growing importance of Portuguese for trading with Brazil, Spanish in Argentina and Bahasa Indonesia in Indonesia.
“A growing number of schools are now teaching Mandarin and in the coming years I think we will see this subject sitting alongside French, Spanish and German as one of the most popular languages for young people to learn,” said Mr Balls.
“In this new decade our ties with emerging economies like China will become even more important and it’s vital that young people are equipped with the skills which they need, and British businesses need too, in order to succeed in a rapidly-changing world,” he said.
“That’s why we want all secondary pupils to have the opportunity to learn up-and-coming languages like Mandarin if they choose, either at their own school or a nearby school or college.”
Modern languages have been struggling in secondary schools, particularly since 2004 when languages were made non-compulsory after the age of 14.
For the most popular languages at GCSE, French and German, take-up declined in England by 45% and 46% respectively between 1997 and 2008.
The lack of pupils studying languages in school has had a knock-on effect in higher education – with some university language departments reporting a shortage of applicants.
There have been particular concerns that the lack of language skills will harm the country’s economy.
Conservative schools spokesman Nick Gibb said: “This government’s policies have resulted in plummeting numbers of state school pupils studying languages at GCSE, and their own report confirms falling numbers in Mandarin too.
“There’s a credibility gap between Ed Balls’s rhetoric and what actually happens in our schools.”
The government has been seeking to increase language learning in primary schools instead.
From this year, seven to 11-year-olds will be entitled to language lessons – and from next year languages will become a compulsory subject in the primary curriculum.

A flagship one-to-one tuition scheme for struggling pupils in England has faced a tutor shortage, says a government-commissioned report.
The scheme aims to offer catch-up help, by March 2011, to 300,000 pupils who have fallen behind.
For this, some 100,000 tutors are needed but only 37,000 teachers have signed up so far.
A government spokesman says there is “overwhelming support” in schools for the initiative.
The PriceWaterhouseCoopers report comes as Gordon Brown and Children’s Secretary Ed Balls announced the scheme would be expanded to cover an extra 20,000 younger primary school pupils.
The report says that only a quarter of the expected number of pupils are getting individual help in the pilot areas.
It found that two-thirds of teachers are broadly supportive of the the Making Good Progress pilots, but many head teachers have struggled to recruit enough tutors to provide the specialist support needed to help pupils catch up.
The report says: “The number of pupils receiving one-to-one tuition is still below the allocation of 10% of pupils per pilot local authority.
“Head teachers/school pilot leaders suggested this was partly a consequence of the ongoing challenges around recruitment.”
It adds that although recruitment problems have reduced they have not been resolved.
Instead of the bottom 10% of pupils getting help with English or mathematics, only 2.5% and 2.4% of pupils respectively in the pilot schools have been getting help, it says.
A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) says this 10% “was not a specific target” and that places had doubled in the second year of the pilot.
Head teachers have also found it easier to recruit tutors as the pilot has progressed, says the DCSF spokesman.
The report confirms that recruitment issues have improved in a majority of schools, with 57% of head teachers being able to recruit enough tutors.
But this has left four out of 10 head teachers struggling to find enough staff to run the schemes.
Last January, some seven out of 10 pilot local authorities said there were “major tutor shortages” in their areas.
In September last year the DCSF launched a major recruitment drive to boost the numbers of teachers registering with the Training and Development Agency for Schools to become tutors.
At that time a DCSF spokesman said it had been decided to increase the pay rates on offer to attract more teachers to sign up.
This resulted in the number of teachers registered for the scheme on the TDA website rising from 25,000 to the current 37,000.
But it is due to be expanded from the current 10,000 to 30,000 pupils in September 2010 and then to 300,000 pupils by the following year.
A spokeswoman for the Training and Development Agency for Schools insisted the number of one-to-one tutors recruited so far was high.
“As well as the 37,000 tutors registered on our database, many, many more have approached their local authorities direct.
“Our marketing campaign which ran between June and October 2009 and included direct mail, online and press advertising and PR was very successful.”
The DCSF spokesman also says there will be a “quality mark to accredit agencies able to provide qualified and vetted one-to-one tutors”.
Shadow Schools Minister Nick Gibb said Ed Balls’s promise for one to one tuition was meaningless until he could explain where he would get the tens of thousands of extra teachers needed.
“This partly explains why the pilot schemes were such as disaster, with only a tenth of those who were promised help actually getting it.
“The small print shows that in reality much of this ‘one-to-one’ tuition will actually be in small groups, which is not the same thing. The government should be more honest when they make announcements like this.”

Nearly one in six children – and almost one quarter of boys – have difficulty learning to talk, research suggests.
A YouGov online survey of 1,015 parents found only half of children with speech problems received expert help.
The survey, for England’s first “Communication Champion” Jean Gross, found some three-year-olds were unable to say a single word.
Ms Gross said the proportion of children with problems is “high” and that getting help early was essential.
“Our ability to communicate is fundamental and underpins everything else. Learning to talk is one of the most important skills a child can master in the 21st Century,” she said.
“The proportion of children who have difficulty learning to talk and understand speech is high, particularly among boys.
“It is essential that all children get the help they need from skilled professionals as early as possible.”
Six out of 10 people questioned for the survey said the ability to talk, listen and understand was the most important skill for children to develop in the early years.
This priority came ahead of the ability to interact with others (26%), reading skills (11%), numeracy skills (2%) and writing skills (1%).
All those questioned said they looked at picture books with their children, told them stories and sang nursery rhymes with them – all activities which boost language development.
The survey showed that the majority of children (51%) did not enjoy looking at picture books with their parents until they were over six months old, but 18% enjoyed this at three months or younger.
Children from more affluent families were reported to enjoy looking at picture books, and listening to stories and rhymes, at a younger age than children from less affluent families, researchers said.
The most common age for children to say their first word, according to the parents surveyed, was between 10 and 11 months.
More girls than boys (34% against 27%) said their first word before they reached nine months. But 4% of children had not said their first word by the age of three.
There were no real social class differences in when children said their first word, the researchers said.
Most parents (95%) could remember what their child’s first word was.
Among those surveyed, that word was most likely to be “Dadda” (15%) or “Daddy” (13%), with “Mama” (10%) and “Mummy” (8%) trailing a little behind.
Speech experts generally think the “da” sound is easier for babies to say than “m”.
The YouGov research involved 1,015 parents of children aged one to to seven, questioned online in December. The figures have been weighted to provide a representative sample.

Almost nine in 10 people are not aware of the risks of carrying extra fat around their waistline.
A survey of 12,000 Europeans found most had no idea that a thick waist was a sign of a build-up of a dangerous type of fat around the internal organs.
The report from GlaxoSmithKline, who make weight loss drug Alli, said this “visceral fat” is strongly linked with type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Most people would lose weight once they found out the risk, the survey found.
Report author Dr Terry Maguire, honorary senior lecturer at Queen’s University in Belfast, said people did not know that visceral fat, which you cannot see or feel and which sits around the organs in the abdomen, is there or that it poses a problem.
It is thought that the danger of visceral fat is related to the release of proteins and hormones that can cause inflammation, which in turn can damage arteries and enter the liver, and affect how the body breaks down sugars and fats.
Only a quarter of those questioned in the Europe-wide study thought being overweight was a risk to long-term health at all.
“Most overweight people still see themselves as having a body image issue not a health problem and they need to understand the health benefits of weight loss as well as the cosmetic results,” he said.
Research has shown that waist circumference is a good indicator of visceral fat and therefore of a person’s risk of diseases associated with being overweight, such as type 2 diabetes.
The report pointed out that when weight is lost visceral fat is more easily broken down for energy than the fat immediately under the skin and even a small amount of weight loss can cause a difference.
When asked about losing weight, two-thirds of respondents said they would go on a diet in the New Year.
But the report’s co-author Professor David Haslam, chair of the UK National Obesity Forum, cautioned that steady sustainable weight loss is important and that crash diets were likely to be unsuccessful.
“They can actually do more harm than good,” he said.
“Invariably weight is put back on, with some of the weight regained accumulating as visceral fat.”
It comes as the Department of Health announced that more than 300 of the 1,500 babies who were likely to have been born this New Year’s Day could be overweight or obese by the time they start school unless action is taken.
Professor Steve Field, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said most of the focus in recent years had been on weight.
“It is the weight around your belly which really does the harm.
“A lot of these things take a while to get into people’s heads especially as there has been so much focus on weight and body mass index.
“I’m not surprised at the findings because it will take more than a few academic papers to really change people’s minds.”

Three quarters of GPs have prescribed anti-depressants even though they think another treatment would have been more effective, a survey has found.
The Mental Health Foundation says meditation halves the risk of repeated depression and should be more readily available, but access is very limited.
The Department of Health in England said access had improved.
Depression affects one in 10 people a year, with more than half of those experiencing more than one episode.
The Mental Health Foundation says mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) halves the risk of further bouts of depression.
A course of MBCT treatment, which typically lasts for eight weeks, combines meditation with cognitive behaviour therapy and yoga.
It is designed to help the patient develop a healthier, more accepting relationship with their thoughts and feelings.
The Department of Health in England said GPs could now refer patients on to specialists for full assessment of their needs.
It is estimated to cost the UK economy ￡7.5bn a year and prescriptions for antidepressants have soared in recent years, reaching 36 million in 2008.
But the report finds 75% of GPs have prescribed medication to people with long-term depression believing that another treatment – often less readily available – would be more appropriate.
The National Institute for health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has recommended MBCT for recurrent depression since 2004.
But the latest report found that just one in five GPs say they can access the treatment for their patients, and only one in 20 prescribe it regularly.
The report says the training and development needed to increase access to MBCT could be achieved under funding already made available by the government to improve access to psychological therapies.
Dr Andrew McCulloch, chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation, said: “Mindfulness-based therapy could be helping to prevent thousands of people from relapsing into depression, every year.
“This would have huge knock-on benefits both socially and economically, making it a sensible treatment to be making available, even at a time when money is short within the NHS.”
Professor Mark Williams, director of the Mindfulness Centre at the University of Oxford, said meditation had been shown to have powerful effects on health.
MBCT has been linked to increased activity in the pre-frontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with positive emotion.
dies have also shown that areas of the brain linked to emotional regulation are larger in people who have meditated regularly for five years.
Professor Williams said: “We now have a very good treatment for recurrent depression, which urgently needs to be rolled out to all patients that need it.”
The report also says MBCT can help treat a range of other conditions, such as eating disorders, anxiety problems and physical problems associated with cancer and HIV.
A Department of Health spokesperson said the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) scheme had expanded the range of talking therapies on offer to patients.
GPs could refer a patient to local IAPT services, and then following assessment, the patient would be offered the most suitable therapy, of which MBCT was one option.
“In 2010, not only will more and more services go live, but they will move to offer a wider range of therapies.”