London, Feb. 21: British teachers should give languages such as Arabic, Bengali and Mandarin the same priority as French, German and Spanish, UK government inspectors announced yesterday.

Ofsted, the education watchdog, said languages spoken by minority communities in Britain must be given more prominence on school timetables, bringing them into line with the major European languages. But teachers’ leaders attacked the move as unrealistic and said there were too few language teachers to make it work.

Steve Sinnott, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: “There is a great gap between aspiration and reality. You can’t just snap your fingers and have enough highly skilled and qualified language teachers in place. We already have a problem with that as it is, with primary schools now looking to teach languages.”

He said it would take four years to train a language teacher from scratch.

A spokesman for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) said the policy was effectively in place already. Following a review of the national curriculum, secondary schools are able to treat all languages equally.

“It’s already happened. From this year, there is no distinction between the languages that schools want to teach. If they want to teach a particular language, they are free to do so,” he said.

The announcement follows a government review by Lord Dearing last year, which said it would be crucial to teach more global languages as China and India grew in economic influence.

Inspectors from the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) also criticised the teacher training system, warning that most “community language” teachers in England were not properly qualified.