A group of international academics specialised in language and education wrote an open letter to Smet to protest the decision to shut down the project. Education in Own Language and Culture (OETC), which includes academics from the Netherlands, the UK, Denmark and Finland, credits the education project, run by Foyer in Brussels, with tangible success over the years in attracting interest from the international community.

The OETC also warned Smet of the dangers of “homogenisation and monolingualism” if the policy of supporting only schools that teach in the local language is pursued. Started 30 years ago, OETC provides services for Turkish-, Spanish- and Italian-speaking children from six primary schools in Brussels to take part of their lessons in their mother tongue. Foyer claims that 90% of its pupils go on to graduate secondary school – a better result than their contemporaries achieve without OETC.

Smet was not convinced by the results of the project and recently cut off future subsidies. The letter from academics warns that the tendency towards monolingualism “is doomed to fail both in its long-term purposes and its short-term goals,” perpetuating “overt and covert forms of inequality in education, leading to predictable outcomes in which speakers of minority languages have to overcome additional obstacles on the road to academic achievement. The tremendous human, intellectual and academic potential they represent is not fully used, and our knowledge economy dismisses the opportunities they potentially offer.”