As Wales’s education watchdog warns that too many pupils are failing to master reading and mathematics, the Welsh Language Commissioner is calling for compulsory Welsh-language training for every teacher in the country. Critics argue that the priorities are dangerously back to front.
Wales is facing a collision between two urgent but potentially competing demands on its schools: a government-backed drive to expand the Welsh language, and an alarming picture of basic educational failure that inspectors warn is leaving a generation of young people behind.
The Welsh Language Commissioner, Efa Gruffudd Jones, published her five-year report this week calling on the next Welsh Government to act “intentionally and ambitiously” to double daily Welsh usage and reach a million speakers by 2050. Central to her plan is a compulsory Welsh-language training framework for all teachers — covering initial training, induction, and ongoing professional development.
But that ambition sits awkwardly alongside the conclusions of Estyn, Wales’s schools inspectorate, whose latest annual report describes an education system “held back by inconsistency, mixed priorities” and beset by “significant weaknesses in the development of some of the basics of education, such as reading, mathematics and digital skills”.
Teachers Struggling With Their Own Literacy
Estyn’s chief inspector Owen Evans found that in secondary schools, consistent high-quality teaching was present in only a minority of schools. More troublingly, the report identified gaps in teachers’ own literacy knowledge — including limited understanding of how to teach reading effectively — as a core problem holding back pupils across Wales.
Teacher training programmes, Estyn said, have been “unable to ensure that we have sufficient staff with the right skills and specialism” — a system-level failure the inspectorate has flagged for years without adequate resolution.
In Welsh-medium schools specifically, recruiting and retaining staff with strong oracy and writing skills is described as “a significant concern” — raising the question of where the capacity for Commissioner Gruffudd Jones’s expanded Welsh-language workforce training would actually come from.
A Question of Priorities
Critics argue that asking an already overstretched and underprepared teaching workforce to absorb mandatory Welsh-language training — without first solving the literacy and recruitment crisis — risks making a bad situation worse. By August 2025, 18 primary schools and 11 secondary schools in Wales were in special measures, with a further 25 schools requiring significant improvement.
Estyn’s Evans put it plainly: “The concerns around levels of literacy and teaching quality across Wales remain and without a sharper and more sustained focus in these areas, too many learners will continue to fall short of their potential.”
The Welsh Government has pledged £13.2 million over three years for literacy professional development, and £25 million annually to support schools on numeracy and literacy. Estyn, for its part, has said it will focus on reading as a priority area from September 2026 — a welcome sign of focus, though some educators worry it comes late.
The Language Commissioner’s Case
Gruffudd Jones insists that the two goals — language revival and educational improvement — are not mutually exclusive. Her report frames bilingual education not as an add-on but as integral to Wales’s future workforce and culture. She calls the current moment “a once-in-a-generation opportunity” to prevent further decline of Welsh in its traditional heartlands.
“The next Welsh Government needs to act purposefully and positively for the benefit of the Welsh language, by introducing bold interventions in favour of the language,” she said on publication of the report. “This is the only way to transform the current situation if we are serious about doubling daily use and reaching a million Welsh speakers by 2050.”
Yet Estyn’s own data shows that teacher shortages are already slowing Welsh-medium education reform, with the inspectorate warning that gaps in mathematics, science and Welsh-medium staffing “risk jeopardising ambitions for a bilingual workforce” — the very ambition the Commissioner is championing.
What Needs to Happen
Both reports, read together, point to the same underlying problem: Wales does not have enough well-trained teachers, in any language. Any serious plan to expand Welsh-language education must begin by fixing that foundation — recruiting more teachers, improving literacy training, and raising standards in the classroom — rather than adding new compulsory requirements to a workforce already struggling to meet existing ones.
The Welsh Government said it would “carefully consider” Estyn’s findings. It now faces the challenge of squaring a long-term cultural ambition for the Welsh language with an immediate and urgent duty to ensure every child in Wales can read, write, and do maths.
23 Years of Labour — Is It Time for Change?
These education failures do not exist in a political vacuum. Labour has governed Wales for over 23 years — longer than any other party has governed any part of the United Kingdom in recent memory. For much of that time, they have relied on the support of Plaid Cymru to pass budgets and legislation through the Senedd.
The literacy crisis, the teacher recruitment crisis, the schools in special measures — these have all grown on Labour’s watch, with Plaid Cymru’s backing. Critics argue that two parties who have shared power for so long cannot credibly claim these problems are someone else’s fault.
With a Senedd election on 7 May, Welsh voters face a straightforward question: should the electorate continue to back the parties whose combined record includes failing schools, weak literacy standards, and a teacher shortage — or is it time to vote for change?
After more than two decades, the argument that Labour and Plaid Cymru need more time to fix the problems they have presided over may be a difficult sell to parents, teachers, and pupils who have been let down by the system for years.
Sources: Welsh Language Commissioner’s five-year report ‘Our time to act: The position of the Welsh Language 2021–25’ (March 2026); Estyn Annual Report 2024–25.
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