Defence ministry spends millions on private schools to avoid Welsh

12 comments

1. >But do those serving in the Royal Welsh get the option to send their kids to a Welsh language school when they get sent to a base in England?

   With the exception of one bilingual primary school in London, there’s no Welsh medium option in England, for anyone. 

   Of course the difference is that their kids will speak English and be able to understand the teaching in English – and their Welsh language learning can be topped up at home, via remote tutors etc. 

   The situation is more akin to service families being deployed to places like Germany and Cyprus, where they don’t speak the language at all. 

   The MOD runs 3 primary and 2 secondary schools in Cyprus for forces families, for this very reason
   https://britishforcescyprus.info/life-in-cyprus/education-employment/

   There’s also the Continuity of Education Allowance which pays for children of military families to attend boarding school in some circumstances. 

2. The MOD has always subsidised private school boarding education for serving personnel in certain circumstances.

   As someone very familiar with the lifestyle, I can understand the logic at play here. Many service personnel are expected to move around the country at a moment’s notice or even abroad. Every two years you are expected to uproot and move somewhere new for the next job. One day you can be moved from Lossiemouth near Inverness, to St Mawgan in Cornwall, and then be send to Lincolnshire after that. Followed by a quick tour to the Falklands in between.

   Giving your kids a tiny bit of stability during all of that is a challenge, whilst some forces parents take their kids around with them, others opt to put them into boarding schools or other private schools that can be more flexible with their kids than a typical state schools.

   The main cited reason for personnel leaving the forces is a lack of stability, and it costs a lot more to train new recruits (especially in roles requiring years of experience) than it does to simply make the armed forces easier to live in with extra incentives.

   Whilst I’ll never agree with Plaid Cymru’s assertion that it is a waste of money to support forces personnel with supporting their families, I do think that simply avoiding Cymraeg is a weak reason to be able to claim that support, but I have a feeling there’s a lot more logic going on under the hood here than is written in this article.

3. Plaid are off their heads getting uppity about this. Do they think services children, through all the upheaval they have to live though, should just be plonked in a school where they don’t even speak the language, wherever their parent is stationed in the world?

4. I and my childrens mother are native Welsh speakers. We sent our children to boarding school in Wales, paid for mostly by the MOD, not because we did not want them to learn Welsh in school, but because we wanted them to. There are some private boarding schools in Wales that do offer Welsh as a subject. The state school alternative for us would have meant that they go to an English or Scottish state school where they do not teach Welsh. Plaid Cymru’s Cefin Campbell should have done more research before putting his foot in his mouth.

5. People need to get it out of their heads that bilingual education is somehow inferior, I meet English only schooled people all the time and the one thing that links them all, they’re all rubbish at spelling!

6. Plaid are absolutely nuts to think it’s acceptable for none Welsh speakers to suddenly get their education turned upside down by having to essentially having to learn a foreign language and keep up with their quality of education at the same time.

   I’m Welsh myself and a veteran, Although I understand quite a lot of the language I don’t speak Welsh, but I chose to enroll my kids in Welsh school, because I was embarrassed by not being able to speak my native tongue.

7. Yeah tbh it’s classic Cefin Campbell getting upitty over “issues” like this.

   I basically think he doesn’t understand why anyone would be against all education primarily being in Welsh. Also gets caught up on quite petty points at times and has very little understanding of the broader Welsh electorate. If Plaid are smart they’ll de-emphasise voices like his in the new Senedd.

8. Almost like this really is a non news story isnt it. Why would you place your children in a welsh speaking school if they don’t know one word of welsh and might only be there for 6 months or a year, all it’s doing is ultimately damaging the childs education. Makes perfect sense to send them to an English speaking school, I’ve no issues with it anyway

9. Plaid Cymru’s stance is political opportunism at its finest. Imagine an assignment abroad, eg Germany. Apart from differences in the curriculum (the allowance is also for continuity), how would a child integrate when both both the teaching and most social interaction is in German? Bilingual in two years is unlikely, whereas social isolation is likely. The issue also works the other way: Plaid will be the first to complain of an “English invasion” should the number of Forces children change the demographic of the school.

   Yes: Royal Welsh (and any Serving individual) have the option to send their children to a Welsh language school on assignment out of the Principality.

10. This isn’t just about welsh medium schools. It’s about military personnel refusing to send their kids to a school that teaches Welsh and teaches in Welsh. I don’t understand parents who wouldn’t want their kids to learn a bit of a language. I have known forces kids who have been carted round the world by parents and know several languages now as adults to get by, in those countries. As a Welsh person who came from an area where my language was wiped out by English colonialism and the Welsh Not, I see this attitude often in the English who live here into their own little England enclaves and to be honest it pisses me off. But the military aren’t living in the real world, and still fight for western colonialism , so I don’t expect anything more. expect

11. The tone of the article suggests this is a problem. Whereas I can’t see an issue.

    It’s not Welsh government money. It has no affect on the Welsh education system. It’s perfectly fine for kids to access education in the medium their parents want – we hear this point all the time in wales when parents can’t access their preferred language.

12. Surely the question is – does this happen with other military bases around the world? Cyprus, Germany, Norway etc?

    If it does then this is not a story. 

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