“Balloning, Cappadocia Turkey” by Dennis Jarvis

The Erasmus+ programme will provide grants for more than four million people across the EU to study or train abroad. It comes into force in January 2014 and aims to address the language skills deficit holding back young people from international jobs.

People in the UK think that as far as they are concerned, they can travel anywhere and can communicate with anybody in English so why should they learn another language?” Vassiliou said. “But this is not the case.

Vassiliou said this thinking is having a knock-on effect in the business sector, where a lack of language knowledge is affecting trade. “Studies show that companies that had a language strategy were able to increase their business by 25%. And at the other end of the scale, those who didn’t pay any attention to languages, lost 11% of their business.”