I’m grateful to you for your kind remarks and for the welcome you’ve given the statement, and both the approach and the tone that we have used in moving this policy forward. You describe the strategy as an adventure. It’s certainly a journey, and it’s an exciting journey. It’s exciting because it isn’t going to be those of us in this Chamber here who will determine its success. It’s going to be the parents who take individual decisions, it’s going to be the parent who decides to use Welsh with their child to transmit the language through the generations, the parent who decides to send their child through the Welsh-medium system, the parent who helps their children doing their Welsh homework in an English-medium school, the people who change the language that they use when they’re in a rugby club, a pub or whatever it happens to be, or the people who actually make an effort to use the language on a daily basis and to ensure that future generations use the language. I hope that, in doing so, the country itself, which has been on one journey with the language, will go on another journey in a different direction with the language.

My own family moved to Tredegar at the turn of the last century, and they were entirely Welsh speaking when they moved from Aberystwyth to work in the collieries of south Wales. They lost the language and the language died like a fault line in the family before the second world war. Now, we are seeing my children—my parents’ grandchildren—learning and speaking Welsh as a first language and regaining the language. The language is reborn in the family. I hope, in the same way, we’ll be able to see that in many families and in many different parts of Wales. I know that the education Secretary shares a very similar family journey herself. I hope that, in that way, we will not simply see the language as acquiring only a skill, but that we will also win the hearts and minds of people across the country, and that we will move away from the sense of, ‘If you win, I lose’—a zero sum game that we’ve seen all too often in the past—where if we speak Welsh, then we exclude people who speak English, and a bilingual policy is Welsh speakers being forced to speak English. So, we need to move away from those sorts of contradictions, and we need to move away from that approach and that tone of debate.

In doing so, it is a journey that we will embark upon as a country. I have already been speaking, through our officials, to the local authorities across Wales on their own strategic plans for Welsh. As I said in an answer to a previous question, I will be making a statement on that, and making an announcement on that in the next few weeks, but I hope that we will reassure parents, but also inspire parents and inspire people to learn the Welsh language, to enjoy using Welsh, not to worry about getting every mutation right and every issue of grammar correct, but to enjoy using the Welsh language, to feel comfortable using the Welsh language, and to feel comfortable doing it socially as well as professionally. We start that in the early years, and I hope that the experience that parents will have, or the good experience of their child learning two languages early in life, is something that will stay with them and enrich them in their lives in a way that it has enriched me and my family in our lives.