In his long expected “language plan”, the Flemish minister of Education, Pascal Smet, made some (baby)steps towards the legal introduction of CLIL in Flemish schools. Although this type of education is already well established in Wallonia and the rest of Europe, it seemed that the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium remained blind for this innovation. The political climate and the fear that French will somehow take over the country did not help our plea for a legal introduction of CLIL.

However, after the evaluation of the pilot projects and the pressure of both Europe and many schools and parents, the minister has included a part about the introduction of CLIL in Flanders in his new language plan. He states that starting from the first year of secondary education onwards, CLIL must be able to be introduced, as learning languages is very important on many levels.There are a number of conditions however. It can only be introduced for 20% of the curriculum and the regular programme in Dutch still has to be available. The languages that can be used for CLIL are also limited, being the two other national language French and German, plus English.

Although this is of course not enough and we would like primary schools to be able to start with CLIL as well, we are very happy with this. It is a start and considering where Flanders (or at least politics in Flanders) comes from, this is a major leap. It is planned that in 2014 this should definitely come into action. Until then, schools using CLIL or wanting to implement CLIL will have to remain doing so in the grey areas of the law. But considering the enthusiasm of schools, we don’t see how this would be an issue.