Those who can, can’t: Teaching in Wales and me

Matt Howells, Secondary School Teacher in Victoria

Another week, and yet more headlines regarding the Welsh Government’s failure to address to the chronic Welsh-medium teacher shortage to meet its impossible target of a million Welsh speakers by 2050.

Bore da from Australia, where I’m currently enjoying the spring sunshine in sunny Melbourne and quietly raising an eyebrow at the naivety of ministers back home upon hearing the latest proposals from Welsh Government.

You may remember me for my searing take on the Welsh brain drain from back in July, so news that Welsh education minister Mark Drakeford wants to increase the provision of Welsh-language teaching in English medium schools made me take to my keyboard again to offer another brutally honest opinion on what promises to be the next chapter of utter failure in the sorry saga of education in Wales since devolution began.

My experience

But why should you be interested in what I have to say? I left Wales many years ago.

Well, perhaps because I am a big part of the problem of why getting teachers to return to Wales – let alone those who can teach through the medium of Welsh – is such an insurmountable feat.

Allow me to explain. I’ve just turned 40 and am a first-language Welsh speaker from Ceredigion. I’ve half a degree in first-language Welsh followed by a PGCE in Welsh and I’m also a qualified translator.

I sound like I should be able to walk straight into a Welsh-essential sinecure, right? Wrong. Getting a high-paying job in an Ysgol Gymraeg should be a walk in the park, shouldn’t it? Nope. Nothing is as it seems.

I got into teaching for all the right reasons. I’m a natural communicator and enjoy sharing information with others and doing something useful in society.

I decided against ‘falling into teaching’ after my undergraduate and still believe that going from playground to playground without experiencing working life in the real world is stunting and damaging to both you and to schoolchildren.

Indeed, I don’t think anyone under the age of 25 without a master’s degree in education and two years’ work experience should be let anywhere near a school, but that’s another story.

At 27, following some years working in the media, I enrolled in a Welsh PGCE course at a university in south Wales and was raring to go.

Unbeknownst to me, the Welsh education minister at the time was showering those who did this course (along with maths, physics, and IT) with a shiny £9,000 grant to meet apparent demand. Quids in!

But there was a much darker reason for this generous lump sum, as I found out over the course of the year.

There’s nothing more deathly boring than PGCE horror stories from students and the trope of the moaning teacher, so I will spare you most of the sorry details of that year.

Demoralising

The experience left me shattered, demoralised, and I ended up deciding not to enter the profession and returned to working in the media and communications. All that grant money had been totally wasted, for the time being.

My reasons for quitting after graduating were threefold.

First, was the reality of the social horror of teaching in Wales, particularly in deprived areas.

I had no intention of being a social worker and the things I saw and heard continued to haunt me for many years.

Second was the behaviour of so many teachers.

Having been raised in an exclusively Welsh-speaking household in a majority Welsh-speaking town in the 1980s and 1990s, other teachers who had Welsh as a second language whose acquisition of it was a huge source of pride, perceived me as a threat.

Teaching in southeast Wales, it was so painful to see teachers correct students’ work with incorrect corrections simply because their standard of Welsh wasn’t up to scratch.

Naturally, these teachers would all speak English with each other in the staffroom at break time.

Third was the attitude and ability of the students.

Let’s face it, teaching second language Welsh to the disinterested is like pulling teeth.

Add in how so many children in Wales live in poverty, and cannot communicate fluently in English, it begs the question why teaching mutations to students with such immense social problems is even a priority.

At a supposed first-language Welsh school in the valleys, I remember asking a group of 15-year-olds who had received their education in Welsh since the age of four how to say ‘I have a cat’.

They all chanted ‘Fi’n cael cath’. For the uninitiated, this means ‘I will be receiving a cat at some unspecified point in the future.’

Yet the teachers didn’t care. The blind were leading the blind.

Freefall

And yet, here we are in Wales with declining living standards, plummeting levels of achievement in education, and a native language in freefall.

So what does the Welsh Government plan to do to boost the numbers of Welsh speakers within its borders?

Would it be making Welsh-language strongholds economically viable so that people from there can stay and raise families?

Is it ensuring that public sector jobs that require Welsh can be worked remotely enabling people to return to the west and north of Wales?

Is it beyond the wit of man for them even to contemplate not sending our best and brightest across the border to university when our own sector is in crisis and giving discounts on student loan repayment to those who choose to stay here after graduating?

No, as ever, the education system is the perpetual guinea pig.

Strapped for cash, resources, and ideas – it will be teachers who will bear the brunt of this new policy. Happy clappy incidental Welsh is one thing, but ensuring fluency in Welsh for both Welsh and English medium schools is a pipe dream.

Registration

Back to why I won’t be joining the cause back home in Wales, despite my qualifications and experience.

Funnily enough, I wouldn’t be allowed to.

Here in Australia, I am a fully registered teacher and earn the same as Australian citizens.

In Wales, I would still be considered a newly qualified teacher and would have to settle for a starting salary of a measly £28,000 and go through the utter humiliation of having a mentor all over again.

You can’t live on a salary that low and I earn twice that amount here so why would I bother coming home?  A quick Google search will tell you that a house in my area costs around £350,000 with barely anywhere to rent.

I have been priced out of my country, essentially.

Similarly, my brother was refused a place on a PGCE Primary course because his only C at GCSE was in maths, while the Welsh government required a B.

Perhaps someone can have a word with the Education Workforce Council before complaining of a lack of Welsh teachers.

Constructive criticism

Teachers who are expressing concern over the latest plans are completely correct in doing so, and I would be joining them, even as a Welsh speaker.

Some may hold genuinely bigoted views on the language, similar to those echoed recently by Professor David Starkey when he described Welsh as an ‘unreformable bronze age language’ during an interview on the Triggernometry show.

But crucially, the point here is that criticising Welsh language policy is not the same as attacking someone’s language.

Some of you may be spitting out your coffee as you read this, but I just don’t think the political, financial, and social energy we expend on saving the Welsh language should be expended on children and young people alone. They are under enough pressure as it is.

Introducing free Welsh courses for adults nationwide would have more of a positive impact given the rapid Teutonic immigration from England.

I taught Welsh to adults at Cardiff University which was a thoroughly enjoyable experience and I helped create 34 new speakers.

Introducing a ‘Welsh and modern studies’ qualification in schools, as happens in Scotland, would inform students of Wales’ history and native culture, where students’ interest in the language would follow naturally thereafter.

Reversal of fortunes

I think a lot about the time in which my parents grew up, and the education they received. Both from Welsh-speaking families, they passed the eleven plus exam and went to grammar schools.

Incidentally, my father attended the same school as Mark Drakeford and was a year older. Not a single lesson was taught in Welsh there at the time, yet the children spoke Welsh in the yard and with the teachers.

And still, their command of Welsh and indeed, English, is far superior to those leaving mainstream education today.

In a socio-linguistic sense, they could ‘afford’ to have their education in English as they spoke Welsh at home and in their communities.

As we entered the millennium, this had completely flipped, and we leaned more and more on education to ensure the language’s survival.

Additionally, I do not think that the closure of grammar schools in Wales, one of the last being in Llandysul in 1984, and their subsequent conversion to Welsh-medium schools is a coincidence when considering that three of the top five schools in Wales are Welsh medium and former grammars.

The element of self-selection is still there, and Welsh medium schools have gone a long way in retaining the discipline, ethos, and dare I say it – Christian narrative – that is the true reason why many parents send their children to them.

I’r ddinas

Native speakers from the west and the north still flock to Cardiff to work in sinecures, or are leaving the country altogether, tearing the social fabric of Welsh for the final time.

Indeed, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I overheard two mothers in the supermarket of my Ceredigion hometown when I visited last Christmas when one said to the other, ‘We’re moving to Cardiff and taking the children. It’s more Welsh there than here now’.

And it is in this farcical circus that we find the unwieldy relationship between the Welsh language and the Welsh education system.

The Welsh Government seems to think that the status and health of both can be raised and that both depend on each other, but as stated in Macbeth which I am currently teaching they are ‘like two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art.’

The language, at best, is at a standstill, with its status far exceeding its substance – the opposite of 50 years ago.

The £9,000 handed to me on a plate is now going to educate Australian, not Welsh children. But for now, I’m happier watching the circus fire from outside the tent on the other side of the world with a schooner of Victoria Bitter.

Iechyd da!