Well, very appropriately for the land of song, we’re all singing in harmony on this, if not entirely in unison. I do commend the Minister for the energy and leadership that he has shown on this groundbreaking policy. I do endorse the approach that he mentioned in his earlier response to Darren Millar about building bridges and bringing people along by persuasion, rather than compulsion. Aled Roberts, in his report, refers to this and how some local authorities are very weak in seeking to create any demand for Welsh-medium education. It is creating demand that is the very essence of the success of the policy, and I hope that this review will bear fruit in that respect—and I’m sure that the persuasive powers of the Minister are certainly up to the task of trying to bring along voluntarily any recalcitrant local authorities who have expressed too little enthusiasm for this project. He will certainly have my strong support in that respect.

One part of the report that has not been mentioned in responses so far is paragraph 1.35, where Aled Roberts refers to the way in which Welsh is taught in schools. He says it’s

‘time for a robust discussion with Qualifications Wales with regard to changing the way the language is taught going forward.’

Well, I know it’s a very, very long time indeed since I was in school and Welsh was taught in a very, very different way then from how it’s taught now. It was taught to me as a foreign language, and I’ve never actually fully recovered from it, in a way. But, I would like the Minister, perhaps, to expand a bit upon that aspect of the policy: in what way are we going to change the way in which the language is taught in order to help to achieve these objectives? It is, of course, obvious that the only way this policy is going to succeed is to have more and more early years children being brought up to speak Welsh as something that is natural and not something that is learned as a bit of a chore, as with many other foreign languages. And I would like to commend in this respect a report that Sian Gwenllian produced not so long ago, which we debated in this house, called ‘Reaching the Million’. There were some very interesting figures in there that show—and encouraging figures, for that matter—that of our three and four-year-old children, an increased proportion of the total have been taught in Welsh—from 18.8 per cent in 2001 to 23.3 per cent in 2011. Well, that’s six years ago; I hope that figure has now increased beyond that, and perhaps the Minister can tell us.

Another interesting feature of that was how the number of children who are being taught through the medium of Welsh has increased where they live in households where neither parent speaks Welsh. The figures in that report were 9 per cent in 2001 and 14 per cent in 2011. This is clearly going to be the case for some time to come, and I appreciate what the Minister said in reply to Llyr Gruffydd a moment ago about how the ambition is different in different parts of Wales, and how Blaenau Gwent is different from Gwynedd or Denbighshire, but inevitably in places like Blaenau Gwent and areas that don’t have a very high proportion of Welsh speakers at the moment, we are going to find that children are going to be speaking Welsh but the parents will not be able to follow them. That is the great challenge, I think, that we will have in the next couple of decades.

But in addition to increasing the demand for Welsh, of course, is the crucial question of increasing the supply of teachers who are able to meet that demand. I know that the Cabinet Secretary has announced this £4.2 million in order to help to deal with that, which is extremely welcome, but I wonder whether there needs to be more done in this respect to encourage teachers. I don’t know whether it is possible to introduce any financial incentives or whether indeed that is desirable, but if there is a way of adding to what has already been done, I think that is something that the Minister ought certainly to consider.

I certainly approve of what has been said about Mudiad Meithrin and the importance of ‘cylchoedd meithrin’ to the achievement of the ambitious goals that we’ve set ourselves. It is absolutely vital that we have more examples such as the one that was quoted in Builth Wells and in areas, in particular, where the future growth of the language needs to take place. I fully agree with those who say that, first of all, we’ve got to consolidate where there is a tradition of speaking Welsh and it is the natural language of communication both in the home, in the work and in the community. But in areas where it’s been 100 years perhaps since there was any Welsh spoken or heard in the streets, then this is something that has to be advanced by the rising generation as people of my age start to fall off the perch and will be replaced by people who have a natural facility to help the Minister to achieve it. I will be 101 years old if I survive to 2050, but you never know—my mother’s mother lived to be 103, so there is a chance that I could still be here. Well, maybe not here, but certainly alive on the planet and adding my voice to the political debate.

But I’d just like, on behalf of UKIP, to welcome this report, which is a further extension of the good work that the Minister has done, and that we’ve supported all the way through.