6. 5. Statement: The Welsh Language Strategy

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:13 pm on 11 July 2017.

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Photo of Lee Waters Lee Waters Labour 5:13, 11 July 2017

Minister, can I commend you for today’s statement and the ambition behind the policy? We should be in no doubt that this is a radical cultural policy that goes against the grain of language use for a century or more, and this is not going to be an easy task, but I think it’s absolutely right that we’re aspiring to do this.

I want to focus, if I might, on the education system. You set a target of having 70 per cent of learners being able to use the language with confidence in all aspects of their lives by 2050, and you’ve set out a clear ambition for the Welsh-medium sector to be a significant part of achieving that, but it seems to me that the Welsh-medium sector alone is never going to be able to achieve growth of that scale. I also do think it’s morally wrong, if I can use such strong language, that children who are educated in the English-medium sector are denied effective use of the language. My own nine-year-old daughter is a bright kid and can’t speak a word of Welsh. Her teachers don’t speak Welsh, and there are many, many schoolchildren across Wales—. In fact, 68 per cent of seven-year-olds are in English-medium schools, and we are denying them the language of our nation, and I think that is wrong. I think this strategy must address that, not simply address the expansion of the Welsh-medium sector, which is the relatively easy bit to do, but address the much more challenging bit of having the vast majority of schools teach Welsh in a way where they are able to meet that target of using the language with confidence in all aspects of their lives. You say, rightly, in the strategy that success is dependent on developing the skills of the workforce. That is a mammoth task. So, perhaps you can tell us how, in practical terms, you intend to do that, and if you could also tell us a little bit about what the Welsh Government itself intends to do to achieve the objectives of this strategy within the Government. Diolch.