Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I’m very pleased to open this debate on the Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee’s report, ‘Achieving the Ambition: Inquiry into the Welsh Government’s new Welsh Language Strategy’. The Welsh Government has committed itself to creating 1 million Welsh speakers by 2050. If this ambition is successful it will mean doubling the number of Welsh speakers in just over a generation. This is an ambitious and radical policy that the committee fully supports. We agreed to carry out an inquiry to look at the practicalities of how this radical policy can be successfully implemented.

We took a wide range of evidence, including informal external engagement sessions with stakeholders and school pupils across Wales. It is clear from considering the evidence that success will require hard work, considerable additional resources and clear targets. It will also need to be founded on the continuing support of all the people of Wales, Welsh speakers and non-Welsh speakers alike.

Our recommendations were, on the whole, concerned with the practicalities of how the ambition can be turned into reality, and the need for clarity on the staging points along the way. Our main concern was that the implications of the aim of 1 million speakers have not yet been fully thought through, and there was a need for more detail and clarity regarding how the aim will be achieved.

We were also concerned that the likely scale of the additional resources and investment required to achieve the aim may not yet have been fully realised. A wide range of other questions remains about how the strategy can be achieved in practice, especially in terms of the resources needed to turn the ambition into a reality. However, I am pleased that the Government’s response and the final strategy itself reflects and has addressed many of the issues raised in the report.

Education is clearly central to the whole strategy. Overall, we wanted the Welsh Government to provide greater clarity around the comparative contribution that Welsh-medium education, Welsh in other schools, preschool and normalisation measures will make in delivering the overall aim, and whether a different focus is intended for different interventions as the strategy progresses. There were also some concerns that realigning the education system to help achieve the language strategy may distort the delivery of other educational priorities. Therefore, any resources and capacity to implement the policy should be in addition to current spending on education.

The committee shared the concern of the Welsh Language Commissioner and the Welsh language Minister that too many local authorities have been inactive in stimulating and assessing demand for increased Welsh-medium provision. The Welsh in education strategic plans have not been implemented as intended, and many local authorities only assess current demand, without looking to see how Welsh-medium education can be positively promoted so that demand increases.

The strategy mentions moving schools along the language continuum. In our view, the key issue is ensuring that more pupils move toward fluency throughout the education system. Seventy-five per cent of Welsh pupils attend English-medium schools. With improved outcomes, these schools may be a rich source of the Welsh speakers of the future. Therefore, the Welsh Government needs to demonstrate how it intends to improve Welsh-language education within English-medium schools. Preschool education also has a fundamental contribution to make if the overall goal is to be met, particularly in terms of normalising the language from an early age. Of course, if the aim of 1 million Welsh speakers is to be meaningful, this must mean more than just the ability to say a few phrases in Welsh. It must mean understanding and holding conversations naturally on most everyday subjects. However, work is still needed on identifying an objective way of measuring progress that is widely accepted.

Of course, our report was published in May and the Government responded to it formally before the summer recess. Around the same time, they also published its final strategy document, ‘Cymraeg 2050’, which, as I’ve mentioned, covered many of the issues raised in our report.

We have, of course, also had the Government’s proposals for a new Welsh language Bill, which we debated only yesterday. Although the legal framework is an important part of the jigsaw, it is a somewhat separate matter from the issues raised in our report, but certainly we will be looking at the content of the Bill in detail.