On reflection, and after being kindly and patiently taken to task  by people who know more about German than I do, I can see that my comments on Routes threw the baby out with the bathwater.  I still see the need for a reform of the early stages of learning German to tackle the dangerous levels of failure and dropout that take place in the first three years of secondary school, and the German teaching a family member is receiving at a comprehensive in the North of England is so poor that I’m having to teach her myself over the internet.  However, each project cannot be expected to tackle all of the problems with a subject, and the networks that have been established – eg   https://www.routesintolanguages.ac.uk/news/second-farlingaye-german-conference  -  are precious, and we need to find some way of sustaining them. In the days of the internet, this need not involve a lot of money, but we certainly need these networks.  John Bald, independent consultant.