Late August always brings its usual flurry of exam news. And for the first time in a while, this year’s Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) GCSE results feel like a genuine milestone. This summer’s cohort was the first to sit exams under the newly overhauled specifications for French, German and Spanish — a shift that, not without controversy, moved the focus away from broad topics and towards mastering a prescribed vocabulary list of 1,700 words.

So how did the new exams land, and what do the numbers actually tell us about the health of language learning in the UK?

Spanish Keeps Its Crown

The headline from this year’s entry data is a changing of the guard, now well and truly cemented. After Spanish overtook French as the most popular language GCSE last year, the 2026 figures show it consolidating that lead further.

• Spanish keeps climbing, helped along by its practicality and cultural reach — everything from Latin pop to La Liga gives students a reason to care.
• German offered a bit of hope for once. After years of worrying decline, entries have stabilised – nothing to throw a party over, but a genuinely welcome sign for Germanists.
• French, sadly, remains the one losing ground, dropping again relative to Spanish. The Guardian’s editorial on the 2026 results put it well: the decline of “traditional” school languages is an alarming trend that risks turning language learning into a preserve of the affluent.

The Grades: A Welcome Turnaround

One of the biggest worries heading into 2026 was whether the new, vocabulary-heavy specs might cause a dip in attainment while teachers and students found their feet. Thankfully, the transition has gone about as smoothly as anyone could have hoped.

Top grades have held remarkably steady – credit to hard-working teachers, for sure, but also to the grading adjustments Ofqual introduced a few years back to stop marking French and German more harshly than other subjects. Language advocates campaigned for years against MFL being graded more severely than other EBacc subjects, and it’s genuinely satisfying to see that finally paying off.

• Across German, French and Spanish, the share of students hitting grade 7+ has held up well against the national average.
• And there’s been no spike in ‘U’ grades among Higher Tier candidates — a good sign the new papers are fair and accessible, not a nasty surprise waiting to happen.

Next Up: Cracking the A-Level Problem

The drop in GCSE entries overall is still a real problem the sector needs to grapple with — but there’s plenty to be optimistic about here. The new specs have bedded in safely, and the old “languages get marked too harshly” narrative is finally losing its grip.

The next challenge is turning this GCSE momentum into A-Level uptake, which is notoriously hard given how expensive small sixth-form language classes are to run. But there are some genuinely clever ideas emerging — the ‘Languages For All’ initiative, a partnership between The Reach Foundation and Royal Holloway, is a good one to watch.

Rather than leaving individual schools to fight their own funding battles, the initiative sets up collaborative ‘hubs’ where schools and colleges pool teachers, resources and centrally taught classes. The results from their Hounslow pilot speak for themselves: between 2022 and 2025, the number of state schools offering A-Level languages tripled, from four to twelve, and enrolments doubled.

For anyone working in languages education, this year offers a solid, encouraging foundation to build on. With fairer grading at GCSE and scalable, resource-sharing models proving themselves at A-Level, there might just be a new blueprint for persuading more students to keep languages going into higher education and beyond.