Anna Brychan delivered her first statement as Wales’ Minister for Education and the Welsh Language yesterday. A Plaid Cymru politician, trade unionist, and academic, she brings extensive experience in education policy. Brychan is also, like all members of Wales' current cabinet, a Welsh speaker. A fuller statement focused solely on the Welsh language is expected later in the summer, but yesterday’s address already signalled the direction of travel.

Brychan's priorities will be familiar to anyone who has followed Welsh language policy over the last decade: expanding Welsh-medium education, strengthening Welsh language provision across the education system, and implementing the Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Act 2025. These ambitions sit at the heart of Cymraeg 2050, the Welsh Government's long-term strategy to reach one million Welsh speakers.

The logic underpinning much of Cymraeg 2050 is relatively straightforward: increase access to Welsh-medium education, increase the number of children learning through Welsh, and therefore increase the number of Welsh speakers. Brychan’s statement broadly follows this model. This approach is not unreasonable. Schools are among the few institutions that governments can directly shape at scale, and in many contexts of minoritised language revitalisation, schools have become a central policy lever. 

The difficulty is that Cymraeg 2050 aims to increase the number of speakers, while most of its policy levers produce something different. In previous writing, I have described this as the distinction between learners and potential speakers. A learner is someone acquiring a language through an educational process. A potential speaker is someone who has developed sufficient proficiency to use the language, but does not necessarily do so in their everyday life. A speaker, in a sociolinguistic sense, is someone who uses that language habitually in real-world contexts. Proficiency is necessary, but it does not automatically produce use.

Interestingly, Brychan herself acknowledged a version of this problem in her statement. She noted that too many young people “lose contact” with Welsh during the transition from compulsory education into further education, higher education, training, or employment. If young people are leaving school with Welsh but abandoning it afterwards, then the challenge is no longer purely educational. It becomes a question of whether there are sufficient opportunities, incentives, and social contexts in which Welsh can be used outside of formal education.

This becomes clearer when considering what happens after compulsory education. For many young people in Wales, leaving school also means leaving the structured environments in which Welsh is actively supported. Some enter English-dominant universities, often outside Wales; others move into workplaces where Welsh is not required or is used only symbolically. Social networks also shift at this stage, and with them the linguistic environment. Even where individuals retain strong proficiency, the everyday necessity of using Welsh can diminish rapidly.

This is why the distinction between learners and speakers becomes central. Welsh-medium education can reliably produce linguistic competence, but competence alone does not generate meaningful, sustained language use. Education can produce potential speakers, but it cannot guarantee speakerhood. Speakerhood is not an endpoint delivered by schooling; it is a social condition shaped by whether a language has a meaningful place in daily life beyond the classroom. Where that wider environment is weak or uneven, educational outcomes will inevitably diverge from policy ambitions.

This 'gap' between competence and use also helps clarify the current policy debate. Cymraeg 2050 sets an ambitious target of one million speakers, and discussion has often focussed on whether government is doing enough to achieve it. Cymdeithas yr Iaith have recently argued that the necessary structures already exist in legislation and planning, and that what is lacking is political will. On this reading, the problem is primarily one of delivery: insufficient teachers, slow school transitions, and incomplete policy roll-out.

Yet this framing leaves a more fundamental question largely untouched. Even if all implementation challenges were resolved - if teacher recruitment targets were met, Welsh-medium school expansion proceeded on schedule, and every policy commitment fully delivered - it is not self-evident that Wales would reach one million speakers. This is because the debate remains largely confined to an educational model of language revitalisation, where expanding schooling in Welsh is assumed to generate sustained language use in society. The uncertainty lies not in whether education can produce learners, but in whether it can, on its own, produce speakers.

What is missing from this model is attention to the environments into which learners move after education. Languages are not maintained through competence alone, but through repeated use within social and economic life. This includes Welsh-language workplaces, community institutions where Welsh is normal rather than exceptional, patterns of housing and migration that allow speaker communities to form and persist, and informal social networks in which Welsh becomes habitual. Without these conditions, education risks producing individuals who can speak Welsh, but for whom there is limited structural reason to do so.

In this sense, schools can create the possibility of Welsh use, but they cannot create its necessity. The classroom can establish competence, confidence, and exposure, but it cannot reproduce the sustained social pressures and incentives that shape everyday linguistic behaviour. Once learners leave compulsory education, whether Welsh is used depends on context: friends, workplaces, communities, and cultural life. Where these conditions are weak, even high levels of proficiency may not translate into use.

None of this is an argument against Welsh-medium education. Education remains the essential foundation of language revitalisation; without competence there can be no meaningful use. Welsh language policy has often treated educational attainment and everyday language use as interchangeable outcomes. If Wales is to move closer to its goal of a million speakers, the focus cannot rest on schooling alone. It must also confront the wider social, economic, and cultural conditions that determine whether Welsh can be lived, as well as learned, beyond the classroom.

Note: A further statement from Brychan focusing specifically on the Welsh language is expected later in the summer. Her initial statement can be accessed via the Senedd plenary record: https://record.senedd.wales/Plenary/16074#A106479.