A Welsh minister has described how in her childhood, stones were hurled at her school bus because people objected to young people being taught in Welsh.
“I was one of a handful of children from my estate in Cardiff who had my education through the medium of Welsh and distinctly remember having stones thrown at our bus as they objected to having a Welsh-language school in their neighborhood,” Welsh Minister for Welsh Language and Lifelong Learning Eluned Morgan said, speaking at her old school to launch a new strategy to increase the number of people speaking the language.
When Morgan attended Ysgol Gyfun Gymraeg Glantaf, it was the only Welsh-language secondary school in Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan. There are now three in Cardiff and one in the vale.
The Welsh government has set an ambitious target of 1 million people, about a third of the population, being Welsh speakers by 2050. There are currently about 570,000.
Other targets set out in the report include increasing the number of primary teachers able to teach in Welsh from 2,900 to 3,900 by 2031 and to 5,200 by 2050. The target for secondary teachers is to increase their number from 1,800 to 3,200 by 2031 and 4,200 by 2050.
The government is planning to invest more money on sabbaticals to give teachers time to learn how to teach in Welsh and on incentives to encourage teachers to teach the language or other subjects in it.
“I am delighted that the attitude towards the language has changed fundamentally from when I was a child and that we now have the opportunity to build on this goodwill,” said Morgan, who went to school in the 1970s and 1980s.
“Reaching a million Welsh speakers by 2050 is a significant challenge. Inspiring the next generation, particularly those from non-Welsh-speaking families, to embrace the language and to use it in all contexts is vitally important in achieving this target,” she said.
“Whether our children attend Welsh-medium schools or learn the Welsh language in an English-medium school, education is key to the success of this ambition. This is why the Welsh in education action plan is so important and why it is a priority for the rest of this assembly term,” she added.
There was alarm in Wales when the 2011 census found that the number of Welsh speakers had fallen to about 562,000. Today, there are 420 primary schools providing Welsh-language education to almost 67,000 learners and 49 secondary schools to almost 35,000 learners.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS