Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:03 pm on 10 October 2017.
May I welcome the Minister’s statement and welcome the fact that he intends to accept all of Aled Roberts’s recommendations? You mentioned in your statement how important it is to identify demand, and you have just acknowledged, in your last answer, how important it is to generate demand and to encourage that demand where it currently doesn’t exist or it isn’t as high as it perhaps could be, and explaining the benefits and winning people over to the case of Welsh-medium education.
One of the recommendations of the report is a more strategic relationship between local authorities and the ‘mudiadau meithrin’, as we’ve been discussing already, but in order to achieve the aims of the strategy we will surely need to do more than that to enhance demand at a broad enough level. So, you’re looking at a situation here where elected members and officers in local authorities are perhaps going to be challenged to meet the current demand. So, what would you like to see happening on the ground beyond the strategic relationship with ‘mudiadau meithrin’ in order to encourage this demand and to win the argument on the benefits of Welsh-medium education to a larger audience, perhaps, than we’re currently reaching?