Well, thank you to Gareth Davies for the question, Chair. The Welsh-medium capital grant scheme, I think, has been one of the great success stories of the last five years and more. It was originally agreed by Kirsty Williams when she was the education Minister and has led to tens of millions of pounds being invested in new buildings and new estate to support the expansion of Welsh-medium education, with new schools opening and new facilities at schools.
It’s part, of course, of the twenty-first century schools programme, which has been a wider success. It’s a rolling programme. It’s not quite as the question implied, that there is a set amount of money each year devoted to things, because the programme rolls on. We’re in band B of the programme currently. There will be new provision opening in the next financial year. Most of the expenditure on that will have happened in the last two or three years, because if a new school opens, the money spent on it happens over a period of time, not just in the year that the school opens. And there’ll be money being spent next year on provision that won’t open, probably, until the year after. So, you’ve got to look at it in that rolling programme way.
The programme is flexible enough to be able to respond to changing patterns of need. We know that, across the spectrum, the number of young people who are being put forward as having additional learning needs has grown in a striking way in recent years, and that is true for Welsh-medium education as well as primarily English schools. So, we are using part of that capital programme to improve the provision in existing schools or in schools that are coming on stream so that there is additional physical capacity for those children who will need their particular needs attended to.
As far as late immersion is concerned, which I think is another remarkable success story of the last few years, the number of children who are coming into Welsh-medium education through the late immersion route is growing everywhere in Wales. I think it does absolutely remarkable work, really, to bring young people who have no Welsh at all to a position where they’re fully able to participate in Welsh-medium education. I’m not going to get anecdotal, Chair, but I was able to take Micheál Martin, who is about to become the Taoiseach again in Ireland, to a late immersion centre in Ynys Môn, where he met children who had come to Wales from England for the very first time and some young people from Ukraine who were settling in Ynys Môn, and saw the remarkable linguistic journey they had been on through the late immersion work that is done there.
Most of that is not to do with buildings; most of that is to do with the astonishing commitment and skills of the teachers who manage to make all of that happen and the ethos that they create within those units. But nevertheless, those children and those teachers do need physical premises as well, and because it’s an expanding part of what we do, then we’ve used part of the capital grant to offer help to those local authorities who are maybe only just coming on stream with all of this and just getting the confidence of knowing that, if they make provision, there will be young people who will come forward to use it, and that they will be able to be turned into sufficiently confident Welsh speakers to be a part of Welsh-medium education. So, that’s why we’ve put some extra priority on those strands within the programme this year and next year, because there is a growth in demand in those areas.