PUPILS at Didcot Girls School will be among 5,000 on track to speaking Mandarin Chinese fluently by 2020.

The school will be one of the first to take part in the Government's Mandarin Excellence Programme.

Supported by the University College London Institute of Education in partnership with the British Council, the programme will see pupils study the language for eight hours a week throughout their time at secondary school.

Didcot Girls' School headteacher Rachael Warwick said she was delighted to be involved.

She said: "We already offer the opportunity for all of our students to study Chinese Mandarin up to GCSE and we run a trip to China each year.

"The programme will enable a group of students to study the language intensively alongside a rich suite of enrichment opportunities, including further travel to China.

"We are very excited and our team of three Chinese teachers can’t wait to begin the programme with our first cohort of students this September."

The Mandarin Excellent Programme is open to all secondary schools but funding is exclusively for state schools.

It will be an intense programme with a combination of teacher-taught classroom lessons, after school teaching, self-study and intensive language courses in the UK and China.

Director of the UCL Institute of Education Confucius Institute Katharine Carruthers said: "This programme provides a real boost and unique opportunity for more motivated pupils to reach a very high level of proficiency in Mandarin.

"We are also developing new innovative teaching methods which will benefit the young people on the programme as well as the wider cohort of pupils learning Mandarin Chinese in our schools."

Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world and is seen as important for young people in the UK to master in order for the country to remain globally competitive.

It has been backed by the British Council, which is the UK's international organisation for education opportunities and cultural relations.

Head of schools programmes at the British Council Mark Herbert said: "Language skills are crucial for work and life in the global race, and Mandarin Chinese is one of the frontrunners when it comes to languages that matter most to the UK’s future prosperity.

"If the UK is to remain competitive on the world stage, we need far more of our young people leaving school with a good grasp of Mandarin in order to successfully work abroad or for businesses here in the UK."