Teacher training colleges set Welsh language targets

TARGETS have been imposed on teacher-training colleges to recruit a certain percentage of Welsh-speakers for the first time ever, according to correspondence released to language campaigners.

In correspondence between the Education Workforce Council, the Welsh Government and initial teacher-training providers, government officials stated: “The Welsh Government has a requirement that partnerships should work towards ensuring that 30% of recruitment to all ITE programmes should be student teachers learning to teach through the medium of Welsh.

“If monitoring returns do not evidence an increase in the number of Welsh-medium students, then partnerships may be required to provide written evidence of their actions to achieve this.”

For the past four years, Cymdeithas

yr Iaith, the Welsh Language Society, has been calling for workforce planning changes to ensure there are enough teachers to meet the Welsh Government’s million speakers target, including setting statutory targets for initial teachertraining colleges to increase the percentage of people who will teach through the medium of Welsh.

Toni Schiavone, from Cymdeithas yr Iaith, said: “This is certainly a step forward and encouraging news. [Education Minister] Kirsty Williams deserves praise for taking this decision. For years now, we have been pressing the Welsh Government to improve things in terms of workforce planning. This is the first sign that they’re starting to act seriously. After all, doing this is essential to meet the government’s own targets. Of course, they will need to go further than these initial targets, including making them statutory and increasing them over time.

“There needs to be a specific strategy for planning the Welsh-language education workforce in order to meet the government’s targets. In that strategy, as well as strengthened targets there also need to be measures including an intensive programme of targeted in-work training for schools and extending the initial teacher-training courses by up to a year to enable prospective teachers to learn and improve their Welsh.”

He added: “These targets should also set a precedent to plan the workforce in other key sectors like the health service. We look forward to other ministers in government learning from Kirsty Williams’ decision.”

In 2017 the Welsh Government set out its aim of there being a million Welsh speakers by 2050, stating: “It is envisaged that the percentage of learners in Welsh-medium education will increase gradually to 30% by 2031.

“In addition, as a new Welsh-language curriculum is introduced, we can expect the Welsh-language skills of learners already in the education system to improve gradually over this period. For the first time it will be possible to include the number of individuals who will acquire the Welsh language as adults – based on the assumption that anyone who registers on a beginners’ course from 2021 onwards will be additional speakers.

“Following the 2021 census, the assumption is that there will be 2,000 additional Welsh-speakers every year through the Welsh for Adults sector.”