James Mills is a web developer in the North East of England and founder of Refresh Teesside »
Mike Hughes is the Head of Business for the Evening Gazette. He will be blogging on all matters of importance to Teesside businesses - and some that are just worth knowing »
Jez Davison, business writer at the Evening Gazette, is a regular blogger on all things business - particularly finance, entrepreneurship and the state of the Teesside economy » 
Karen McLauchlan is the Evening Gazette's deputy business and features editor - with special interest in all things industry, property and arts related » 
Jeremy Middleton is a venture capitalist and the co-founder of FTSE-200 company HomeServe » 
Deloitte, which has 23 offices across the UK including Newcastle, is among the country's leading professional services firms » 
ClimateNE & Climate Change Schools Project support the move to a low-carbon, resilient economy and help businesses avoid risk and realise commercial opportunities. Posts by Jen Atkinson, Krista McKinzey and Harriet Thew » I read a report last week that said one in ten adults are now learning a foreign language to go and work overseas. But what I often wonder is why those at the top of the UK schools system over the last two generations didn't consider the future business climate when coming up with the language curriculum.
Surely 20 to 30 years ago, the powers that be must have realised that the Chinese, Indian and to a lesser extent Middle Eastern economies were going to boom in the coming decades. So why weren't languages like Arabic, Hindi or Chinese more commonplace in classroom timetables across the country?
If they had been perhaps we would see more businesses from the region taking advantage of the many opportunities in thriving cities such as Beijing, Mumbai or Riyadh.
Of course some would say classroom timetables have more to take into consideration than business and without French, German or Italian lessons at school we wouldn't be able to go to Europe and ask for a ham sandwich and a can of coke or tell exchange students what we did last weekend. But surely more languages on the curriculum from the booming economies would have put us in good stead today.
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