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.
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
RSS