, Plenary
Statement by the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Welsh Language: The UK Budget
On the broader issues that the Member raised, I don’t think I could have said it more clearly near the start of the statement that it was never our expectation that every accumulated difficulty of 14 years was going to be solved in only 14 weeks. That is how…
, Plenary
Statement by the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Welsh Language: The UK Budget
Can I start by thanking Heledd Fychan for her comments on coal tips, and a few other things that I didn’t have an opportunity to mention, such as Horizon, and contaminated blood, and so on?
, Plenary
Statement by the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Welsh Language: The UK Budget
Well, Dirprwy Lywydd, of course I disagree with Peter Fox in almost every way. We have a different approach on these benches to the one that was followed in the last 14 years. We believe that we have to rescue the UK economy from the state it had got into as…
, Plenary
Statement by the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Welsh Language: The UK Budget
Dirprwy Lywydd, people in Wales are 235 times better off under a Labour Government, and that’s only in the first year of being in charge. Now, taken together, as a result of last week’s UK budget, there is an additional £1.7 billion in our overall settlement…
, Plenary
Statement by the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Welsh Language: The UK Budget
Diolch yn fawr, Dirprwy Lywydd. The UK budget presented by the Chancellor of the Exchequer last week represents a step change in the management of the UK’s financial affairs. The first female Chancellor in our history faced and met three key challenges: to…
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
Diolch yn fawr. Thank you very much.
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
Well, one of the reasons—and I didn't say this in my original answer to Cefin Campbell—that I want to see plans for delivering education through the medium of Welsh is that I want to see a plan that shows how the schools will provide information to parents to…
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
So, there's more we can do, Chair, I think, to work on that and to provide more information to the Senedd as the Bill progresses to make sure that these are joint efforts, using their resources to the best possible effect, not where there's any sense of…
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
Well, that's why I said to Lee Waters, when I said that we are open to considering how we can provide more clarity, perhaps in the Bill, but more likely in the EM and so on, to explain that relationship. We're talking about two statutory bodies here. Now…
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
Well, I'm happy to consider that point. As I said, on the one hand, the Bill doesn't include everything that's ongoing already. There's a great deal of work being done to find ways, through the mentrau iaith, Merched y Wawr, yr Urdd, young farmers' clubs and…
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
Well, if I could ask Bethan just to be clear as to what the Bill actually says.
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
I think WESPs already require a reference to transport as part of the efforts to extend the availability of Welsh-medium education. I would fully expect that to continue to be part of the remit of WESPs in future, but I don't think that this is the Bill that…
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
The Bill does that already. I promised earlier this week that we would write to Mike Hedges on the youth services side of things, and I'm very happy to share that correspondence, Chair, with you, if that would be helpful.
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
Well, Part 5 of the Bill is very much about how the language is used beyond compulsory education, and not just in the classroom either. I would absolutely expect—and I think, in a way, I'm making the same point here as Heledd made earlier in relation to the…
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
Yes. That is the issue, isn't it? You want to talk to the right person, and the right person—. The coleg cenedlaethol will be always the coleg cenedlaethol, wherever you are in Wales. The early years sector in one part of Wales may be better represented, in a…
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
Well, thank you, Vaughan, for that. I think I have read a number of sectors putting the argument to you that they are under-represented in the Bill and that, therefore, there should be steps taken to strengthen references to them. Early years education was…
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
Chair, I'm conscious that I said at the very beginning that I wanted to be open-minded about a number of things that the committee would want to explore, and I feel I've spent quite a lot of the session actually explaining why I don't think that certain…
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
Well, my reflection on the point about children who have their primary education in the Welsh language and then choose to go to an English-medium school is not a point of morality, it's a point of investment. We have invested—the system has invested—in those…
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
Yes.
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
I think it is broader than the Bill. It's important to do in order to celebrate the fact that we have created something quite novel, haven't we? We have done a lot more in the more recent period, and we've succeeded in doing that too. There's an increase in…
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
I'm going to try and answer and then I can be corrected. I think this Bill is about planning and setting planning parameters that local education authorities can operate within. What I don’t want, myself, is for those planning parameters to topple into a…
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
Well, of course, I don't want to lose anyone from Welsh-medium education, but at the end of the day, those are choices to be made by parents. And there is nothing in the Bill that would provide hurdles for those who want to move from English-medium education…
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
Well—. Sorry. Sioned wants to come in.
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
I think my anxiety about strengthening the language in the way that Heledd described is where it begins to look as though we are making decisions that properly belong with parents themselves. I'm not sure in my own mind that we are not more effectively to…
, Children, Young People, and Education Committee
Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Bill - evidence session 16
The intention of the section is just as Heledd Fychan explained it: when children start out in primary schools that provide education in Welsh, they progress to secondary schools that do the same.
