Alun Davies: This review and this process will consider the Welsh-medium education plans. That’s the purpose and the point of the WESPs, and we will be considering how we can expand Welsh-medium education over the coming years. This will be an important foundation for how we create more Welsh speakers for the future. But it will also enable people to learn Welsh early on in their life, and the hope is...
Alun Davies: You were right, in writing that letter, that some of the plans lacked ambition. What I have tried to do this afternoon is try to respond to that in a positive way, and not by overreacting, if you like, but to respond in a way that affirms our ambition and our vision for the future, and to ensure that we achieve our ambition through joint working. I very much hope that we will be able to do...
Alun Davies: I’m grateful for those remarks, and if I might start where you finished, I think the measure of our success will be the silence in the media, in many ways. I hope that we will be able to move forward and deliver a policy that is done not through confrontation and not through a steamroller, but through persuasion, through support, through promotion and through conversation with people. I...
Alun Davies: Presiding Officer, I would like to start once again by thanking the Plaid Cymru spokesperson for his welcome for today’s statement. I will start by agreeing with your initial analysis that it is important that we acknowledge that this isn’t business as usual and that we do want to change things. I hope that by setting a very ambitious target, such as a million Welsh speakers, we are...
Alun Davies: I’m grateful to Darren Millar for his kind words. As ever, he’s roamed far and wide, using the statement as a starting point rather than as the purpose of this debate this afternoon. But, let me say this, Darren: there is a lack of ambition in some of those plans, I think you’ve absolutely right in that. The challenges that you’ve laid out in your questions, and the totality of your...
Alun Davies: Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. May I begin by placing on record my thanks to local authorities for their work on the 2017-20 Welsh in education strategic plans? Some plans show an ownership and commitment to the Welsh language, and I welcome this. However, there are others who need to demonstrate a greater level of responsibility for the growth of Welsh-medium education,...
Alun Davies: We acknowledge that education is the main vehicle for creating Welsh speakers. We already know that there are just under 9,000 five-year-olds attending a Welsh-medium or bilingual school. We cannot afford to be content with this. Wales needs an inclusive education system that both sustains and creates Welsh speakers. By creating demand for Welsh-medium education and ensuring access in those...
Alun Davies: It’s clear, Presiding Officer, that there’s a great deal of concern across the Chamber. I will, therefore, place my final letter to the Secretary of State, dated 7 March, in the library of the National Assembly for all Members to be able to take a view on that and the process that’s been followed. In terms of the question asked by both Bethan Jenkins and Lee Waters on the role of the...
Alun Davies: I will not join the Conservative Party this afternoon in rubbishing individuals who apply for public appointments, and I will not join the Conservative Party in making those allegations against individuals who apply and who have a right. I believe that everybody who applies for public appointments has the right to expect their application to remain confidential. It is a matter of record that...
Alun Davies: Presiding Officer, I’m sure you will agree with me and Members across the whole of the Chamber that the deliberate, I assume, leaking of the name of any individual who applied for this post, as happened yesterday, is to be regretted and is entirely contrary to the standards we expect of the public appointments process. It is a gross infringement of their personal privacy. At the same time,...
Alun Davies: The BBC board member for Wales must be fully able to champion the diverse needs of the Welsh people. The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport did not agree and we could not support her recommendation. Strong candidates were available. The Secretary of State refused to discuss them with me.
Alun Davies: And we also understand there are £3.5 billion-worth of cuts still to come in the pipeline. Now, you should do the maths, the same as I can. Let me conclude. I won’t test the patience of the Deputy Presiding Officer any further. Further education has seen a transformation; it has been proactive in pursuing a radical change agenda. This Government wishes to pursue that agenda, which is to...
Alun Davies: I think the Cabinet Secretary started that last week in her statement on Hazelkorn, which signalled a very real, and different, and radical approach to moving forward. But let me respond more profoundly to the debate that we’ve had. We’ve heard from both Oscar and John that further education provides opportunities for people and that second chance for an education, and we understand that,...
Alun Davies: If I could just finish the sentence. But I do wish to ensure that we are able to deliver a richness of opportunity of choice, together with excellence in standards, and to do that in both our national languages. I’ll give way.
Alun Davies: Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer, and I think it’s been an excellent debate with much common ground, despite the somewhat churlish remarks of the Conservative spokesperson in opening the debate. I trust he’ll take the opportunity in his winding up to perhaps reflect further on the tone with which he opened the debate. Certainly, the debate has risen far beyond the...
Alun Davies: Formally.
Alun Davies: Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer, and I’m grateful to all the Members who’ve contributed to the inquiry and to the debate this afternoon. In many ways, Deputy Presiding Officer, I felt the inquiry was a great example of the Assembly and Government: the correct tension that needs to exist between the two institutions, as referred to—an occasional tussle between us all—but...
Alun Davies: I very much hope that that isn’t the case. May I just say that what I just said in response to your question and to Mike Hedges’s question previously was that some of the plans had been disappointing, not all of them, and it’s important that we put that on record? When it comes to future legislation, we do have an agreement that we will consider and review the Welsh language Measure,...
Alun Davies: Some local authorities are still consulting on their Welsh in education strategic plans. Once I have received them all, I will make a statement on the way forward. As I have said already this afternoon, I am disappointed by the lack of ambition demonstrated by some of them.
Alun Davies: I think one of the answers of the Cabinet Secretary earlier about the sort of education system she’s looking at developing in Wales will in itself ensure that teachers want to teach in Wales and will find that teaching in Wales is a very attractive career option. We know that about a third of all teachers in Wales do speak Welsh, so there is some headroom at the moment. But I recognise that...
