Thank you very much. I’m going to refer to point 3 in the motion, which is on the importance of the education system in its entirety to reach the Welsh Government’s target of a million Welsh speakers. I’m going to discuss Welsh-medium education, rather than the Welsh second language qualification as such. I do note that the Welsh Government, in the ongoing consultation on increasing the number of Welsh speakers to a million, does note, under the point on education, that:

‘We need to see a significant increase in the number of people receiving Welsh-medium education and who have Welsh language skills, as it is only through enabling more people to learn Welsh that we will reach a million speakers.’

Clearly, education is crucial for you as a Government too in this area.

Today, the vast majority of Welsh speakers do learn the language at school, while the vast majority of those who were born in the middle of the last century and prior to that did learn the Welsh language at home. This is information emerging from the report published by the Welsh Language Commissioner. One of the main reasons for this change is that language transfer at home isn’t as effective now as it has been in the past. It is not that Welsh-speaking parents are less likely to transfer the language; that isn’t the problem. It is that there are fewer families in which both parents speak Welsh. Therefore, if we are to reach this target of a million Welsh speakers, it is crucial that the number of children in Welsh-medium education does increase. Clearly, Welsh-medium education is far more likely to produce Welsh speakers than English-medium education, but, unfortunately, as we have already heard, the percentage of children in Welsh-medium education isn’t increasing. The percentage of Welsh-medium schools was lower in 2014-15 than it was in 2010-11, and the numbers of children educated through the medium of Welsh doesn’t appear to be increasing much either. Therefore, it is clear that we have to be far more ambitious.

We must actually scrap this inconsistency that exists across Wales in which you have a situation where, in Cardiff, out of 124 schools in the authority, only 19 are Welsh-medium or dual-stream schools. In Merthyr Tydfil, out of 28 schools in the authority, only three are Welsh-medium or dual-stream schools. This is in stark contrast to Gwynedd and Ceredigion, where almost all schools are either Welsh medium or bilingual—a total of 167 schools.

The Welsh in education strategic plans are therefore crucially important, and that’s why I raised the question earlier with the Cabinet Secretary for local government, because there are no targets contained within those strategies; therefore, they cannot be held to account, and, therefore, how can we make real progress? We must have realistic targets and realistic timetables, and it’s not me saying that; it was Alun Davies who said that this morning at a committee where I was in attendance. He seems to be agreeing again now, which is excellent.

It may be useful to go back to the recommendations made by the Children, Young People and Education Committee in the previous Assembly—there were 17 very important recommendations that actually do provide a way forward in terms of Welsh-medium education. For example, No. 13:

‘The Minister should use the powers available to him under existing legislation to intervene where local authorities are failing to deliver their WESPs.’

That’s just one recommendation; there are many other excellent recommendations contained here.

So, certainly, we need to raise our game in terms of Welsh-medium education or we will never reach that very laudable target of a million Welsh speakers. There’s a huge amount of work to be done, and we need to drill right down in order to ensure that there is real action. Thank you.