Yesterday the contractors started to demolish Treherbert Infants School. A victim of the madness that is ruining the Welsh Education System. A system, which was once the envy of the World. It saddens me that a measure designed to strengthen the wonderful Welsh Language, Europe’s oldest spoken tongue, and one I wish I could speak,is doing so much damage to teh education system of Wales.
You see, there was a definite need for Welsh Medium Education in the Rhondda, those families that still used Welsh as their primary language were forced to send their children to English medium schools, and slowly the language was dieing. So the Local Education Authority began opening Welsh Schools to fill this need. Unfortunately because these schools were new, they were seen as “better schools” than the existing English medium establishments, so parents whose primary language was English began demanding that their children be sent to these schools. Soon the Welsh Schools were oversubscribed, so more were opened. Again these schools began attracting the children of English speaking families. So more and more money is being diverted into unnecessary Welsh Medium Education, and good little schools like Treherbert Infants are shutting forever, they could not get sufficient pupils to be viable, children who should have been going to them were diverted to unnecessary Welsh Schools.
All this misplaced expenditure is not helping the survival of the Welsh Language. I only know of one person who speaks Welsh at home with her children, in the vast majority of cases, as soon as the children come home from school, they revert back to English. None of the children who go to Welsh Schools who use the Library I work in use the Welsh Language to talk to their school friends whilst they are in the library. They might as well go to English Medium Schools.
The things that have helped the Welsh Language gain the healthy status it has today were ironically brought about by the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her very Anglophile Secretary of State for Wales, Nicholas Edwards, now Lord Crickhowell. They past the second Welsh Language Act, which gave Welsh full legal status with English in all National, Local and now Assembly Government business, thus giving employment to hundreds of Welsh Speakers, and encouraging those who spoke Welsh to use it. They established Siannel Pedwar Cymru, the Welsh Fourth Channel, which broadcasts in Welsh at primetime 24/7, thus creating a blossoming Welsh Language film and television industry. Finally, they made Welsh one of the core subjects for the National Curriculum in Wales; all children in the Principality have to study the language throughout their school career, from five to sixteen. All this has benefited the Welsh Language a great deal more than Welsh Medium Education ever has.
