Welsh teenagers 2 years of education behind English teenagers

Yes, but how many schools are offering it as the main science course for GCSE pupils? Double award combined science and triple award physics/chemistry/biology options are still offered.

My children's school is entering most pupils double award science as before, and maintaining the option to study all three sciences for separate GCSEs. A very small minority who find the GCSE workload particularly challenging are offered the single award integrated science option.

Saying "science has been reduced to one GCSE" as if that applies across the board gives entirely the wrong idea.

Triple is being scrapped. Your kids will be some of the last to have that as an option. It will be double or single, competing against kids who can do triple as standard.

Except that some languages are more equal than others when it comes to being useful, unless your ambition is that your children should only ever live and work in one small place.

I think that's very regrettable. I really hope the review in 2028 leads to that aspect of the plan being ditched. But removing the option of triple science and introducing a new single GCSE integrated science option - which I strongly suspect and hope will only be used for a minority of pupils - is not the same as "reducing science to one GCSE".

I know of schools in England which enter a minority of pupils for BTEC Level 1 introductory award in applied science as an alternative to GCSE double award combined science. Maybe you could say science in England had been reduced to zero GCSEs, but I think that would also be misleading.

People who find learning Welsh worthless would do well to find out a little about the erasure of the Irish language and how the education system has brought it back into Irish life.

it’s to be celebrated always. Stating a native language is a wasteful time is shamefully ignorant and xenophobic

I certainly don't think the Welsh language should be suppressed.

There are consequences, though, to speaking it as a native language.

In North Wales, people speak it natively at home and are educated in Welsh. They are fully immersed in Welsh. They learn English as a foreign language. Not everybody is going to pick up English to a usable level and they're then stuck living in a very small part of the UK with very limited opportunities. It will also limit the possibilities/probabilities of larger (especially foreign) companies opening sites, such as back office functions, in that area.

The positives are that Welsh communities in that area aren't just comprised of villages full of pensioners, due to all the young people moving to the bigger cities.

It's obviously a trade-off, but there's almost certainly a correlation between a lack of high paying private sector jobs and poor English language ability in those regions.

Ireland seems to be able to manage this conundrum?

In North Wales, people speak it natively at home and are educated in Welsh. They are fully immersed in Welsh. They learn English as a foreign language. Not everybody is going to pick up English to a usable level and they're then stuck living in a very small part of the UK with very limited opportunities. It will also limit the possibilities/probabilities of larger (especially foreign) companies opening sites, such as back office functions, in that area.

Do you actually live in North Wales?

Only about 1% speak Irish as a first language though.

only 18% of Welsh people speak Welsh at all. There is no official record that I can see of the number of people who can’t speak English, it’s thought to be absolutely tiny if any

To add to this. It might have been the case back in the 50s that some people didn’t pick up English to a usable level, but these days, what with the internet, films and tv, English print media, and of course the amount of non Welsh speaking retirees and second home owners, it’s really not a problem.

The state of some of this.

Welsh medium pupils generally do better at GCSEs than English medium counterparts, that trend is reversed for PISA results. So I can only assume that the test doesn't translate perfectly? I can't explain that.

Wales has always been at the bottom of every league table for everything, pre-devolution.

These results are measure of the old system, one that we've changed.

My kids are WM educated. My son just got A* in all three sciences, Maths and an A English Language and Literature in his second language. WM education achieves incredible things.

I'm not having anyone outside Wales tell me that Welsh kids shouldn't learn Welsh. It's their fucking birthright. Our culture is our own to manage, thanks. If kids need more time for maths then we'll decide where to find it. Diolch.

Possibly, but once you know a second language it is easier to pick up a third.

The benefits are in the way the brain processes things, not just language.

Oh and Patagonia is not exactly a small place.

Clywch clywch!

I spent six weeks in Gwynedd in 1999 and it was extremely common to meet people that didn't speak English to a 'usable' level. I was quite shocked that the younger people, especially, 'struggled' with English. I'd expected full bilingual ability and that's not what I encountered.

I've not been back there in the past twenty years, so things might have changed, but the government is now legally obliged to promote the Welsh language (which seems reasonable, given the history).

And another thing, if North Walians have such a poor grasp of English, how come so many English people claim to hear them chatting away in English in pubs and shops, and switching to Welsh as soon as an English person comes in?

It's so depressing to see how few people know about the benefits of being multilingual. It isn't as much about the specific language as the neural pathways it creates, the grey matter it produces, the benefits to short and long term memory.
It is shocking to see how many people naturally jump to "it must be the Welsh language" rather than the far more obvious link to poverty. Wales has the highest poverty rates in the UK, and 31% of children in Wales live in poverty. The link between poverty and the failure to achieve academically is long proven.

I'm torn, my children are happy in their Welsh schools. The youngest is year 5 quite an anxious child and very dyslexic, and I'm always grateful there isn't the focus on tests and school is a safe place. The oldest is year 9 and again loves school, I don't know whether she'd be as happy in England as nothing to compare too. I suspect they could be pushed more, but I don't know if I want them pushed. As I've got older I've started to put less weight on education anyway. I've known some kids who weren't academic thrive in life.

My DN is at a Welsh medium school. His parents’ mother tongues are Welsh and German and he is fluent in both of those as well as English. He got 7 A* and 3As in his GCSEs and is doing Chemistry, Physics, Maths and Economics at A level.

There is research indicating that being bilingual can slow down the progress of dementia in later life (though not prevent it completely).

There are some interesting nuances which need looking at and I am not sure what to make of. Children doing the exams through the medium of Welsh tend to come from families of a higher social economic status but unexpectedly they are achieving lower grades when they would be expected to achieve higher grades.
I’m all for encouraging the Welsh language but this needs looking at. Children who don’t speak Welsh at home are increasingly being encouraged to sit the exams in Welsh.
I have thought this was a good thing .
Also for the size of the population Wales has significant social deprivation.
I think this is more complex than it initially looks.

I also found that English isn’t introduced in many primary schools until age seven by which time a lot of children are reading some English and they never do the basic phonics. Blaming dumbing down of the curriculum and Labour politicians is too simplistic but could be a factor among many others

I was born in the early 60s, Welsh speaking home, educated in Welsh medium schools throughout including nursery. Learned to read Welsh and English at the same time, never struggled with either as far as I recall.

One of my children didn’t have any difficulty at all, the other one took a long time to sort out English spelling and did no English at all until year 3.
I am in favour of encouraging bilingualism but I think we have to look at how it’s done and to look honestly at all the factors that are leading to lower achievement.

I don't think anyone has suggested that learning a very minority language is a waste of time if it's learned in out of school time. What is a waste of time is using part of a school teaching week to learn a language for purely 'heritage ' reasons when the learners of said language are lagging tragically behind pupils in other parts of the UK WHO THEY WILL ULTIMATELY HAVE TO COMPETE WiTH for university places, jobs etc. It's borderline neglectful, pathetic and ridiculous.

In our small Welsh village we have one adult who claims to speak Welsh. At a recent meeting we ran out of agendas, but never fear, we had a supply of agendas in Welsh as I think we are required to. We gave one to our Welsh speaker, who was unable to read it. As all the claimed numbers for Welsh speakers are self reported it's probably best to take them with a pinch of (Welsh!) salt.

irish nearly became a dead language because it wasn’t taught in schools. That’s all that would happen to Welsh. Is it really worth losing a native language so your teenagers can compete for jobs?