Newport opens third Welsh-medium primary as demand outstrips places

Newport’s third Welsh-medium primary school opened its doors on Monday with 60 reception pupils, a waiting list of 83 and a council already looking for a site for a fourth, in a city where fewer than one in ten adults speak Welsh.

Ysgol Gymraeg Glan Wysg, built at a cost of £11.4m on a former council depot beside the River Usk, will grow year by year to 420 pupils by 2033. It joins Ysgol Gymraeg Casnewydd, which has been full since 2016, and Ysgol Gymraeg Nant Gwenlli, opened in 2019. Applications for Welsh-medium reception places in Newport have more than doubled in seven years, from 68 in 2019 to 143 this September.

The city is, on paper, one of the least Welsh-speaking in Wales: 9.3% of residents said they could speak the language in the 2021 census, against 17.8% nationally. The parents filling the new school are overwhelmingly non-Welsh-speaking themselves. A survey by the council found that 78% of families applying had no Welsh speaker at home.

“I grew up in Pill and nobody I knew spoke a word of it,” said Natalie Burrows, whose daughter Esme started on Monday. “But I watched my nephew come out of Casnewydd at 11 speaking two languages and I thought, why wouldn’t I want that? It is a free bilingual education. In England people pay for that.”

The headteacher, Elin Rowlands, said the school would run Welsh classes for parents from January and that the first year would be spent “building a Welsh-speaking world inside the gates” for children who hear English everywhere else. The school has 11 teaching staff and found them with difficulty: Welsh-medium schools across the south-east report a shortage of qualified teachers, and the council paid a £3,000 relocation allowance to three recruits from Carmarthenshire and Gwynedd.

The Welsh government has a target of one million Welsh speakers by 2050 and requires councils to expand Welsh-medium provision in their school organisation plans. Newport’s plan commits it to a fourth primary in the west of the city by 2030, and the council said on Monday it was in talks about a site in Rogerstone. The city’s Welsh-medium secondary school, in Bassaleg, is being extended to take 1,200 pupils.

Councillor Rhodri James, the cabinet member for education, said the growth reflected parental choice rather than policy. “We are not sending leaflets out. People are walking in and asking,” she said. “We turned away 83 families this year. That is 83 children who will go to an English-medium school because we did not build fast enough.”

The school’s first assembly on Monday ended with the pupils singing Calon Lân, learned in their first hour. Most of the parents watching did not know the words.