One year ago today, the Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Act 2025 received Royal Assent. It was a major moment in Welsh language policy, giving legal force to the central ambition of Cymraeg 2050. That is, the target of reaching at least one million Welsh speakers by the middle of the century. It also clarified that education is expected to do much of the work.  Lately, as part of my wider interest in Welsh language policy, I have been re-reading the legislation more closely. Now, one-year since Assent, the Act sits between statute and delivery. This is perhaps a good moment to ask what the Act is trying to do and what questions it raises for the future of Welsh.

1. Why I'm (re)reading the Act

Rereading is not simply repetition. In academic work, it is often the point at which understanding becomes more exact. I often return to texts that have proved difficult to understand; indeed, one test of strong writing is whether it can sustain rereading. A first reading usually establishes orientation: the subject, the stated aims, the obvious significance. A second reading can facilitate different questions. What is assumed rather than argued? Which concepts are overstretched? What is required, encouraged, measured, deferred, or left under-defined? 

That is why I am re-reading this Act now. At first glance, its significance is clear. The Act gives statutory force to the one-million-speaker target and makes education central to delivery. But the more important questions are structural. How does the Act expect schools, local authorities, and national institutions to produce Welsh-language outcomes? What kind of Welsh speaker does the Act imagine? How does it connect ability with use? Where does it create enforceable duties, and where does it depend on future guidance, capacity, and political will? One year on, these questions matter because the Act has arguably begun to move from legislative statement to institutional responsibility.

3. The questions that remain

The Act gives Welsh language education a clearer statutory form. The remaining questions concern the conditions required for that form to become practice. The first is implementation. The Act connects national targets, local authority planning and school-level delivery, but its practical force will depend on guidance, funding, and capacity. While a law can require plans to exist, it cannot, by that fact alone, ensure that schools and local authorities have the time, staff, expertise and resources to make those plans effective.

If pupils across Wales are expected to make stronger progress in Welsh, the system will need enough teachers, leaders and support staff with the linguistic confidence and professional expertise to deliver that progression. This applies across the whole system, not only in Welsh-medium schools. Dual-language schools and English-medium schools with increased Welsh-language expectations will also need staff who can teach, model and normalise Welsh with confidence. The Act’s ambitions therefore depend not only on curriculum design, but on recruitment, training, professional development and retention.

One of the Act’s functions is to make school categories and Welsh-language expectations clearer. That may reduce ambiguity, but it does not remove the uneven conditions in which schools operate. Local authorities differ in their existing Welsh-medium infrastructure, demographic profiles, parental demand, staff availability and routes into bilingual provision. Although the Act very usefully creates a common structure, it is important to remember that that structure will be implemented through unequal systems.

The Act is also necessarily concerned with progression in Welsh-language ability, including through common descriptions of proficiency. That is important. Yet Cymraeg 2050 is not only a project of producing people who can speak Welsh. It is also concerned with increasing the use of Welsh: socially, institutionally and in the workplace. The difficult question is whether school-based gains in ability will become confident use beyond formal education. A pupil may acquire Welsh, pass through an assessed pathway, and still enter adult contexts in which Welsh has little social function. The Act can strengthen the production of Welsh-language ability; the wider policy challenge is whether that ability becomes ordinary use.

The fifth question regards continuity. The Act is concerned with Welsh language education and learning Welsh, but its ambitions cannot end at compulsory school age. If pupils leave school with stronger Welsh, the next issue is whether further education, higher education, apprenticeships, workplaces, youth organisations and communities give them reasons and opportunities to use it. Recent Welsh Government education priorities refer to a “continuous and uninterrupted language education pathway”. That phrase identifies a real policy problem. Pathways can break between primary and secondary school, between school and college, between education and work, and between formal competence and everyday confidence.

One year on, the Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Act 2025 is still too new to be judged by outcomes. It cannot yet be assessed by whether it has increased the number of Welsh speakers, changed pupils’ Welsh-language ability, or strengthened the everyday use of Welsh. Those are long-term tests. But it can be assessed as policy design. The Act takes the ambition of Cymraeg 2050 and necessarily gives it institutional form. It assigns responsibilities, creates planning structures, defines school categories, and links national targets to local authorities, schools and settings. Its immediate significance lies in the attempt to make Welsh-language growth administratively possible.

That attempt now sits in a changed political context. The Act received Royal Assent in July 2025; by May 2026, Wales had elected a different Senedd. Plaid Cymru won the most seats, Reform UK Wales came second, and Labour failed to top a devolved Welsh election for the first time. Importantly, the Act depends on sustained public authority over time. That is, consistent ministerial direction, local authority planning, school-level implementation, workforce development, funding decisions and public consent. A law designed around the year 2050 will have to operate through changing governments, budgets and arguments about the place of Welsh in public life.

The question one year on is therefore whether the Act is durable enough, specific enough and well-supported enough to shape Welsh language education beyond the political moment in which it was passed. If it succeeds, it will be because statutory duties become institutional capacity, because plans change classroom practice, and because pupils leave education with Welsh that is not only assessed, but usable, confident, and socially alive.