Some new perspectives on the 2018 A level results: STEM gap remains but decline in foreign languages exaggerated

There has been much hand-wringing in the press about the demise of MFL at A level.  However, when we aggregate MFL subjects (French, German, Irish, Other Modern Languages, Welsh, Spanish), and look at their share of total entries, which at least partially deals with population changes, a different picture emerges.
In fact, MFL’s popularity has remained remarkably steady and the much-publicised declines in French and German are being compensated by rises in popularity of other languages such as Mandarin. Entries for Chinese Languages at 3,334 (+3.1%) are now higher than for German (3,058) and perhaps warrant a separate data set in next year’s JCQ tables. More...