This is quite a good newspaper article on parents and schools encouraging children to speak several languages and for a newspaper article, it seems quite well linked to what seems to be known.
It seems that there are great benefits to knowing several languages besides the practical ones. This is true for older people as well. People can become more flexible and this confers cognitive benefits and it also seems that being multilingual can help with recovery from strokes and make the development of dementia less likely.
There still seems to be resistance in some places to the development of languages other than English at school but this is perhaps less true than it used to be.