The influence of advocacy, infrastructure, policy-making, policy arbiters, and policy disruptors on language learning in English secondary schools since 1945

Taking the history of languages education policy in England as its case study, this paper examines how the practice of teaching and learning French and other languages has been shaped, in various ways, by advocacy; by institutional infrastructure; and by policy-makers, policy arbiters (in the sense of Johnson & Johnson 2015), and by what I call policy disruptors. The paper identifies examples where advocacy – from within and outside the languages education community – appears to have had incremental effects on languages education (the increasing emphasis given to the spoken language; the growth in Spanish teaching provision). However, I argue that the most obviously positive change, making languages available to all in secondary schooling, was largely the result of a change in policy external to the languages education community, that is, the comprehensivization of secondary schools. By contrast, the loss of infrastructure to support languages teaching over the last few decades has had a negative impact. Looking more closely at the delivery of actual languages education policy, I show that certain policy arbiters (i.e. actors with an influence on the implementation of policy at different levels) play a key role. I further argue that it is important to attend in particular to the role played by policy disruptors, understood here as actors at various levels who may, often unintentionally, interfere with and frustrate the intended outcomes of languages education policy.