Growth is down to parent demand

I ATTENDED Welshmedium education and I can assure Howard Gunn (Your Views, October 26) that it was not because I “lacked sufficient English language fluency to be able to effectively learn through the medium of English”, yet Mr Gunn insists that Welshmedium education was originally introduced for this reason.

Having known some people who attended Welsh-medium education in its earliest days (Aberdare being one of the earliest Welshmedium primary schools), I can say it does not apply to them either.

Mr Gunn’s gripe appears to be that Welsh-medium schools are populated by children who are not “native speakers” of Welsh. This is true. He feels this is a bad thing and lays the blame for this on political interference, particularly from Leanne Wood and Plaid Cymru. Given that during the growth of Welsh-medium education over 70 or so years in this area, Plaid Cymru has hardly been dominant in the area’s local government, it seems an odd direction in which to point the finger of blame.

More particularly, the growth in Welsh-medium education has come from only one source – parental demand. If Mr Gunn truly believes children from Englishonly homes should not be in Welsh-medium schools, he would be better placed standing outside Welsh-medium schools talking to parents and convincing them of the error of their ways. David Walters Trecynon