Probably not. Most sixth forms not only require you to have taken a GCSE in the subjects that you are looking to study at A-Level, but to have achieved a decent grade in them.

Our institutions very much value language skills but there is no universal entry requirement that students must have studied a modern foreign language at GCSE or equivalent. However, there may be course-specific requirements, so we strongly encourage students to check universities’ websites for details of these.

GCSEs could be used to assess eligibility for a uni course Regardless of the subject you want to study, the majority of university courses look for at least a C grade in English, maths and perhaps science – that’s grade 4 or 5 under the revised structure.

Ofqual’s report said French and German “consistently appear to be among the five hardest subjects at GCSE”. Statistical measures of subject difficulty shows French and German GCSEs “are more severely graded than the majority of other GCSEs at most grades.

When Ofqual repeated this analysis for the 2019 exam series, it found that the overall difficulty of subjects had changed, with Spanish now the seventh most difficult GCSE, while French and German were still among the five most difficult GCSEs.

Spanish is a fairly easy language because it is largely phonetic so choosing Spanish at GCSE rather than, say, French or German, may take the pressure off, especially if you’re taking on a lot of subjects. A GCSE in a language is a great qualification to add to your CV.

Supposing the percentage of people who speak these languages in each country remain constant, English will still be the the language with the most speakers in the year 2100. The number of English speakers will grow from 1.5 billion people today to well over 2.3 billion.

Looked at over just the last decade, Urdu also emerges as the fastest growing language in the world. Its total speaker numbers increased by 39% between 2011 and 2021.