Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:34 pm on 24 November 2020.
Thank you, Minister. May I begin by expressing my disappointment that we are discussing both of these reports together? Five minutes to scrutinise both. There isn't sufficient time to scrutinise your success in relation to your activities. We can't go through the world of work, the field of education and the community, et cetera, and there's not enough time to look at the functions and the responsibilities of the commissioner and to work out whether he has sufficient resources and work out why he's had to spend more on legal and professional fees than expected. And it is important, because, for me, this suggests that the complaints procedure is still overly complex. Many of them have not actually been proven, as we see. It reduces the amount of money available for the other work that the commissioner should do, namely to assist to create more Welsh speakers and increase language usage.
May I welcome the code of practice that was published in February, which supports institutions to understand how to conform to the standards? Of course, there should be more standards to conform with by now. We said this last year as well, and the lack of enthusiasm for standards was most evident pre COVID. We can't blame the virus for that. But I have more enthusiasm for seeing an improvement on the work of promoting and persuading others, to attain the target of a million speakers. And as the Welsh Government is determined to bring more responsibilities for this back in house, we'll see how much time the Minister will have to accomplish this, considering her other new challenging and important responsibilities.
I'm very keen to see what will happen to the conclusions of this work with the planning authorities, because it appears to me that the impact on the Welsh language is just interpreted as a tick box, rather than thinking for opportunities under section 106 agreements, et cetera, as a way of increasing the demand for Welsh-medium education. I'm very pleased to see the commissioner presenting the case for a code of practice under the new curriculum. Mainstreaming the Welsh language in English-medium schools won't be easy, but this is the best way forward, in my view, to create more bilingual generations to come. It is much better than the very awkward proposals on trying to change two-stream schools into bilingual schools. That is not a good way of proceeding. In addition to that, we're still having difficulty in recruiting teachers, as the Minister said, especially on secondary level. Therefore, I encourage Welsh Government to consider the continuum code of practice seriously, and also to focus on early years provision, to make it easier to choose Welsh with confidence.
Could you tell us, Minister, whether COVID has interrupted your plans to have 40 new nurseries by 2021, and how you are going to catch up? And could you tell me where the additional 800 children in nurseries across Wales—are these children scattered across the whole of Wales, or are they in English-medium placements? And I would ask the same about the increase in the percentage of children that move into Welsh-medium primary schools. Can I ask why you have actual figures for one, and then a percentage for the other? That's not at all transparent. Although I believe that the Camau programme is a wonderful idea, can you tell me whether every Flying Start setting has the appropriate staffing for Welsh language transmission?
As I said, there are too many questions for me to cover today, but I wish to turn to the GCSE figures. It's a moderate success, and I welcome any kind of success, but perhaps seeing the grades of pupils would help me to understand something else—whether we should welcome this further, or whether there's a problem with attainment in this mandatory subject. And yes, it should be mandatory, because we still need to demonstrate that this remains a valuable qualification. We also need to reverse the fall in the demand for the A-level if we have any hope of getting the teachers we need. Thank you.