I didn’t bother learning Welsh at school – this is how we could change that for others

Llongyfarchiadau, Bethan, on a clear, well-argued, rant-free contribution. The key phrase, perhaps, is '...while these lessons taught us HOW to speak Welsh, they didn't teach us WHY we spoke Welsh'. Certainly suffering 'Welsh lessons' in English medium schools, but probably even ib Welsh-medium education, there are I suspect thousands of kids who have no notion why they are learning or expected to use this language, no idea that it was once, not so long ago, the main language - for many the only language - of the country they live in. This, of course, has to be addressed, as Bethan emphasises, not just in 'Welsh lessons' but across the curriculum.

An excellent article. Well done too for mentioning the private sector (Costa) - The Welsh language will never prosper without proper integration and acceptance by the private sector. Currently only the Public and Third Sector have embraced it.

"Let’s normalise the use of Welsh and remove the stigma from the language." normalise meaning make it as well spoken as English and what is this stigma and where does it come from please?

Interesting and thoughtful piece - it's clear that simply continuing the process of teaching Welsh in schools without addressing the broader issue of "why" is doomed to fail.

Excellent article!

A very thoughtful and illuminating piece. In my view, the easiest and most basic steps the Welsh Government / authorities could take are: (1) to send a circular to all parents of pre-school children asking if they wish to register for bilingual education; and (2) to ensure that adequate so-called "Welsh medium" (bilingual) school places are made available to meet the demand. The impression I have is that many parents are simply not aware of the "Welsh medium" option, or think it is not available for their children, or simply don't think about it at all. If the WG is serious about its 1M target, these steps should be actioned immediately.

As an ex-Welsh teacher, I've been saying this for years. Welsh as a second language as it's currently taught is a total waste of time. I would replace the qualification with 'Welsh and modern studies' to give some context about the language's history. If we also give history GCSE more of a Welsh focus, that would also help.

Reflects my own experience. I went to school in Neath in the 70s, dropped Welsh as soon as I could as it was considered a waste of an ‘O’ level slot. Never mentioned that it could actually by useful in life & broaden work opportunities. In my own case I work in the marine science & technology sector so not much use for Welsh, but having a better understanding would enable me to communicate my work to a broader audience, and interact more with the public sector in Wales.

This worthy article is symptomatic of countless Welsh students and pupils. Indoctrination comes to mind. A case even, of those who do not wish to learn even the basics of the Welsh language, are not opposed to hearing it. The message though from the article is fundamental. Why is it important, and why has it not been put in context hitherto . That must be answered as a priority. If you agree, then it's who will deliver it. Nothing survives unless put in a context that people can understand. Its not overt science but let's not try and bash one door down when we need to open a few doors. Let's talk culture, history and heritage first.

By and large I agree. I find it such a shame that I didn't learn, and now it's very difficult to do so where I live now in England knowing no speakers. An opportunity missed that was never presented to me as an opportunity, just something that had to be done.

Going through much the same education system there's not a lot to disagree with here, and probably feeling much the same towards Welsh. Although I'll add to your point about history: You're right its not that its against learning about the wider world. But learning about Wales through history and geography allows us to see and learn about the world through the Welsh perspective - rather than the "British". How we have interacted with the nations around us differently - and how they interact with us differently to how they would the English. Its also about learning of Welsh achievements which may not necessarily be English ones. The education system is where we receive our programming for life and where these changes must first begin to take place. When kids come home from school with new Welsh words hopefully they'll inspire regretful Welsh parents. It does need to be done in a more procedural way though.

We are taught the history of the invaders, roman saxon and norman and everything else is considered pre history.It is rare thes days for an indigenous people to have their culture and history air brushed from view, as is the case with the original brits.The natives of this land are still here despite centuries of oppression and this is the history that should be taught to our children in order to provide them with a perspective and an incentive to learn the ancient tongue.Welsh history must be placed on the curriculum in Wales if the young are to have any pride or understanding of the truth that has been hidden for ages, since Bishop Stubbs in the 1800s declared the Welsh to be lesser breeds and pushed a germanic version of the past that is still taught in schools to this day.

It seems to me that for every person who regrets that they didn't learn Welsh properly, there is also the chip-on-the-shoulder person who turns anti-Welsh (not just language, but culture and everything associated), complaining when they are "barred" from jobs because they don't speak Welsh. And so it turns into a fight. It shouldn't be like this, and it doesn't have to be, if only the political will were there to fix it properly.

In relation to the importance of an understanding of Welsh identity and culture and the place of the language in society we need to have a sound base of history teaching. I agree that Welsh history still tends to start with the Romans and does not acknowledge that the Britons occupied the whole of the main island of Britain prior to the Roman occupation and Anglo-Saxon/Scandinavian invasion(s) and military campaigns. Although quite different to the adminstrative structures of Roman Britain, Celtic British society was culturally interesting with a developed social and economic structure and sophisticated collaborative defensive arrangements. This can be seen from the pattern of hill forts across many parts of Britain. Most people in the UK are not aware that the language that has evolved into modern Welsh was also spoken by Britons across what is now England and much of what is now Scotland. Neither are they aware that the nations of Wales, England and Scotland are, in historical terms, relatively recent administrative constructs that evolved over time in the light of dozens of local wars and campaigns. There is still a live academic historical debate as to the degree of 'ethnic cleansing' that was associated with the successive waves of in-migration from northern Europe but, whatever positions is eventually accepted by the majority of historians, the social and cultural changes and displacements in this period 1500-1000 years ago are still a surprisingly sensitive topic on both sides of the England-Wales border. I have now lived in northwest England for 40 years and find that if I refer to some of the accepted historical facts regarding this period to my English neighbours and friends they tend to be uneasy. They seem uncertain of their understanding because they just aren't aware of their own history, whether or not they are descended from Celtic or from Anglo-Saxon/Scandinavian ancestors. Welsh education is no exception. England also air-brushes its European origins out of the historical record. This offers huge opportunities for fun with local Brexiteers, who I sometimes mischieviously accuse of themselves being descendents of European economic migrants! Previous school curricula in Wales may well have been drafted with political sensitivities in mind. In the unsettled pre-devolution 1960s when a lot of work was done on curriculum development there were bombing campaigns in progress and nervousness in Whitehall and the Welsh Office regarding the potential for civil unrest in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. I attended Grove Park Grammar School Wrexham in the late 60s and secured 'O' and 'A' levels in history. When I checked my certificates recently I note that they say that my academic awards are in 'English History'! And the certificates were issued by the Welsh Joint Education Committee! This illustrates quite graphically the establishment attitudes to Welsh identity (or the lack of it) at that time. To be fair we were taught a limited amount of modern Welsh history but the earlier history of the Britons and what are sometimes called the Anglo-Saxon invaasions was completely ignored.

I totally agree with what you have said, I also had pathetic Welsh lessons once a week at school, but no importance was put on them. We were never taught Welsh history or local history.

No offence but I found this article pretty depressing. I can't imagine growing up in such a deracinated environment. I felt Welsh by instinct as a child and never experienced the feelings you describe. I knew my identity from the start, was curious about my history and didn't need a school teacher to spoon feed it to me. Does your average Englishman, Irishman or Scotsman need the education system or print media to tell them who they are? The fact that someone from Neath (probably one of the 'Welshest' areas in Wales) had to discover Welsh identity as an adult is quite worrying to be honest. Perhaps we really are on our last legs.

A lot of people on here seem to share bad experiences and I'm not surprised, but nothing that I can say I ever encountered. I have friends from places all around wales in the 80s who never had any Welsh lessons or exposure to Welsh whatsoever and find even pronouncing Welsh place names tricky. None are negative to the language, but it's something they struggle to connect with. I grew up in a totally English speaking area, but I never knew of negative feelings towards the language. We were all naively very keen and in the comp we had a great Welsh speaking deputy head who must have spun magic over the school, with a very seriously competitive annual eisteddfod where the whole school was involved and lots of rehearsal time and practise sessions in and outside school time. We had lots of so called incidental Welsh from all of the teachers - commands like sefwch, eisteddwch, ewch and dewch were totally normalised. Two assemblies a week were called Welsh assemblies - all hymns in Welsh and sinfing started with a gyda'n gilydd" and quite bilingual in general. It's down to the school and it's commitment and ethos. Kids who are negative are influenced by less than positive attitudes coming from the school and it's staff - the solution starts there. Schools have to have the right ethos and negative attitudes from rogue members of staff has to be sorted out. I have some issues with what I learned in the Welsh lessons - in the 1980s it was too formal and paid no attention to local dialects, but the Welsh teachers were outstanding and inspiring - Welsh O level was very popular and many of us did Welsh in the sixth forrm, not as lessons, but something extra the teachers put on. i suspect that many schools and many teachers these days may have lost the belief and enthusiasm - not that it was ever perfect.

It's a curious thing, but your experience of Welsh in school has very close parallels with my experience of RE. I had a largely secular upbringing, in which any mention of religion extended to being taught to say I was "C of E" (even though we were in Wales) if anyone ever asked. I sat through RE lessons in school in a state of deep seething resentment, wishing that I was being taught something useful like maths or science rather than all this drivel. I gave it up at the earliest possible opportunity. Then I left school, picked up a Bible and started to read what it actually said, became an evangelical Christian and remain so to this day. I sometimes go into schools to take RE lessons and give every pupil a Gideon New Testament to take home (something which never happened to me in school). In both my case and yours, as you describe it, the problem was partly that the subject was being taught out of compulsion, rather than any degree of enthusiasm for it amongst either teachers or pupils, and never was there any inkling that any of it might actually matter. Just as worldwide there is a strong anti-correlation between countries with established churches and countries experiencing church growth (i.e. evangelical churches are growing everywhere in the world except in Europe and in British colonies such as Canada and Australia, and fastest of all in predominantly Muslim countries), so the record of governments in imposing languages upon a reluctant population is not a good one: the Republic of Ireland is the classic example, but the record of the French government in imposing pure 'Academie Francaise' French upon the population is little better. Therefore the revival of the Welsh language has to start first and foremost with economics - Wales, all of it, needs to recover some pride in itself, and that isn't going to happen without economic growth. Sadly there is little prospect of that happening without a complete reversal of the type of economic policies that Labour and Plaid Cymru have pursued over the last 20 years.

Growing up in the 60/70s in Cardiff, in a community with (As far as i know) not one Welsh speaker, you won't be surprised to learn that we felt no connection to the language whatsoever. Most of the people I grew up with were descended from either English or Irish incomers. Though my parents were born in Wales several of the my own family ancestral lines came from England and further afield. There was a certain disdain, if not open hostility, in some of the community for what they called "Welsh nanny goats" whenever they encountered someone from elsewhere who had the nerve to actually speak the language. There was also a feeling (real or imagined) that we were looked down on by Welsh speakers as lesser, that the language was something used to metaphorically beat us up for being not quite Welsh enough. Our first exposure to the language was in primary school, and while we embraced it with the enthusiasm any young kid has for something new, there was no explanation of why we were being taught it, and this carried on into our secondary years. In history we were taught only English/British history, with little mention of Wales, except in the context of conquest. I don't remember ever being told about subjects such as the Act of Union, Owain Glyndwr or Wales' part in the industrial revolution. No mention of Welsh as the language of the original Britons, no mention of Deheubarth, or Hywel Dda, or Rhodri Fawr. And so, without any kind of cultural context, and with the only source of pride in being Welsh seeming to be the national rugby team, it's hardly surprising that for most of us in the class there was no clear incentive to learn the language. Most of us dropped it at 14 and like me, studied French instead. (I also absolutely loathed the Welsh language teacher, which didn't help). I left school at 16 and immediately moved to London so I wasn't around to witness the slow resurgence of the language in later years. Incidentally, in London I had the experience of being made to feel like some clod from the back of beyond, and that made me clean up my speech and in the process lose my accent. In the mid-90s thanks to being made homeless I ended up moving back to my parent's place in Cardiff, and was immediately struck by the number of people speaking the language openly in the city, and the number of jobs being advertised requiring bilingualism. And that, coupled with a reconnection to my home city meant that for the first time in my life I had an inkling of what Welshness might mean to me. A French friend once expressed surprise that "You can't speak your own language?" and since then I've been ashamed that I cannot. I've now lived in the South East of England for most of my life. I like to boast to my friends that I'm 'culturally Welsh' even though I'm not a speaker of our language. But without the language, there is something missing. I wish i'd had the opportunity to bring my kids up in Wales, in a Welsh language school, in the hope that they'd appreciate our culture and history in a way that was denied to me in the 70s. I'm 59 now, and would dearly love to learn the language again, but living in semi-rural Hertfordshire there's no opportunity (And believe me, I've tried). A nation's culture and it's language should go hand in hand. We've been denied that for so long that we almost lost sight of them, but for the efforts of some brave and far-sighted people in past decades. We dare not let both the language and the culture be again subsumed into some vague Anglo-Britishness, where our history is replaced by pageantry, and our culture and language is only paid lip service when it suits others.

Da iawn Bethan, dal ati.

The problem with this article is that it is rather uninformed. There is an obvious lack of knowledge of the decades long struggle to attain even the present very, inadequate and superficial rights to use the Welsh language in Welsh society. A cursory reading of resources such as:- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Language_Society ; http://cymdeithas.cymru/what-is-cymdeithas-yr-iaith ; would benefit many of the contributions here. It has been the fundamental policy of the English/British state to eradicate the Welsh language since the 'Acts of Union' in the sixteenth century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_in_Wales_Acts_1535_and_1542#The_Acts_and_the_Welsh_language.

Seems to me that there are two potentially conflicting aims in the teaching of Welsh at school. On the one hand a key aim is to increase the number of speakers of the language and this seems to be relatively unsuccessful, if not a total failure, but many of the problematic factors here lie outside of the school gates. The other aim or aims link to the qualification side of things and it's prestige, importance and legitimacy with respect to the perceived standard which is English. The Welsh language is always working against outside pressures to prove it's legitimacy to external stakeholders or perhaps more accurately the die-hard opponents or sceptics if you like. This drives the need for studying towards legitimate qualifications, which can be judged alongside qualifications in English or other modern languages, dependent on whether the learner is highly proficient in the language or a complete novice. Having a legitimate qualification and creating fluent and confident speakers don't seem to be well matched objectives, when it comes to studying Welsh as a second language. There is a lot more emphasis these days on speaking than there was in my day, but in my mind it should be entirely about speaking and the confidence to do so, with very little, if any emphasis on grammar and other idiosyncracies. This would not make for a seemingly legitimate stand alone qualification and so perhaps it should be combined with history as many suggest, but in terms of confidence and other things, I would also link it to other things like drama and the performing arts, with elements built in to other courses - IT related things, science and maths could certainly benefit from viewing things with a Welsh language lens. Many of our best scientists and mathematicians have been Welsh speakers and I don't think that's a coincidence. As a scientist myself, I can see that the overcomplexity of the multitude of terms in the English language for very similar and related things can often obscure the simplicity of many concepts and links between them. Viewing things from different perspectives can only be beneficial. In my mind that is part of the reason that multinational scientific teams work so well.

No one is ever going to know whether learning Welsh as a second language in school is worthwhile until analysis is done of the people who hold Welsh essential jobs. A few years ago I asked the National survey of Wales what percentage of people who held a job described as "Welsh essential" DIDN'T have a Welsh speaking parent. Just 15%. Welsh in schools, even for pupils from English only homes in Welsh medium schools, isn't a ticket to employment in the public sector. There is a shortage of supply of Welsh fluent employees though. The number of applicants for teaching positions in WM schools is less than half the number of applicants for teaching positions in English medium schools.

Excellent article Bethan. Really made me think.

Yes Bethan, just to add to Richard Morse's worries above. Most people in Wales are sadly uninformed of the incredibly long winded campaign for even minor improvements in Wales. Many people of eminence/power (aristocracy and many politicians) that were born and bred here fought tooth and nail against Welsh empowerment and cultural expression

Great article. I had a very similar experience in Pontypridd in the early 80's. No buy in from the government, no way to articulate the benefits to parents, very poor teaching and discouraged by our own teachers to bother with welsh, encouraged to learn French instead. I think the government need to provide free welsh classes in the evenings to all who wish to learn as adults who were let down by previous governments, if they are serious about this!!

Great article, Bethan! Not disimilar to myself, growing up in Port Talbot! Da iawn!

I'm somewhat surprised by your experience of Welsh teaching, for someone your age, because it sounded to me like something typical of an earlier era and that things had improved in Wales since then, but perhaps not. I know a Cornish speaker who grew up in Cornwall, then went to a very well known and highly regarded university in England, who didn't know that the Cornish language actually *existed at all* until he was 25. My own school history curriculum didn't actually cover anything before 1066, and the GCSE course focused entirely on the 20th century, mainly to teach us of the evils of Communism and that we were now, in the age of neoliberal global capitalism and Pax Americana at the End Of History. By the end of Year 9 we got as far as the Civil War in the 17th century, then the 18th and 19th centuries were skipped entirely which was good, because all that British Empire stuff is quite embarrassing really.