Kirsty Williams the Welsh Liberal Democrat Education Minister yesterday announced an additional £30 million to develop new Welsh-medium education.
The capital investment aims to help reach the longstanding target of 1 Million Welsh speakers by 2050, by supporting young learners to become Welsh speakers by the time they leave school.
This announcement follows hot on the heels of the new Welsh Curriculum approved by Senedd members this week which will be introduced after an extensive consultation and is the first complete reform of the curriculum in a generation.
Kirsty Williams Welsh Liberal Democrat Education Minister, said:
“Providing first class schools for children in Welsh-medium education is a key driver for Cymraeg 2050. Attending a Welsh-medium school ensures children become at least bilingual.
“We also need to increase the number of learners in English-medium and bilingual schools who are learning Welsh successfully. I want to ensure more bilingual schools introduce a greater proportion of the new curriculum in Welsh, to give learners a strong linguistic foundation.
“The funding complements our fantastic 21st century Schools and Colleges programme, which has completed 170 new schools or college projects in its first phase, with 43 new projects in the pipeline.
“We are driving forward the delivery of capital projects to increase the percentage of learners in Welsh-medium education, helping achieve our long-term goal of a million Welsh-speakers by 2050.”
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3 Comments
Growing up bilingual is a wonderful start to life. It opens a person’s eyes to the possibilities of other cultures and other ways of doing things (and not just in relation to the languages they speak). I am, sadly, not bilingual myself but several members of my family are and I can see the confidence it gives them.
Learning a second language is almost as good, provided it starts early enough, although any language learning at any age is beneficial. I can clearly remember my first visit to France at the age of 14 on an exchange and the culture shock of finding another world where they did things differently.
I learnt Welsh for a couple of years – what a fantastic culture and a beautiful language.
There is an Anglocentric attitude that minority languages should wither away and everybody learn and exclusively use English (or French, in the Francophone world) but this ignores the fact that one’s own language or dialect is an expression of one’s background and culture and allows one to express oneself more precisely and in a way more emotionally satisfying. I’ve heard the view that bilingualism ‘confuses’ children but small children are nearly all smarter than that.
From the educational point of view, getting a second language really allows one to understand how one’s own language works, and how other languages can work, but differently. This is a definite help when it comes to learning a third or subsequent languages.
Though learning Welsh helps to create a stronger identity, it should not be at the expense of other transferrable skills. It should be voluntary and taken to the level that is appropriate for that person. For those to whom learning languages does not come easily it should not be forced down their throats.