Cymraeg – The blind leading the blind

[Cymrodor]

It’s not mentioned amongst the carefully selected snippets of info in the report presented by the Exec Board today, but there’s a fourth statutory investigation ongoing into the council’s swimming lesson failures. Meanwhile, the Council continues to deny children their alleged right to at least have a choice of language, with bus loads of children from Welsh-medium primary schools forced to have the swimming part of their curriculum delivered in English. English-medium schoolchildren would never be forced to have their lessons in Welsh. There would be outcry at the mere suggestion.

As usual, the monitoring report doesn’t go in to specifics such as what the statutory enforcement orders actually are. The Council received – and had no objection – to an order in 2020 for its swimming staff to spend a couple of months learning just enough Welsh to be able to do their jobs. This was hidden from the public and the members who represent us by not being mentioned in the monitoring report, allowing the Council to ignore the order, continue with its English-or-nothing offering, and peddle an alternative narrative that the failure is down to recruitment issues.

As a result of the failure to provide a translator for a meeting, referred to in the report, the council was forced to update its procedures, amend staff guidance and inform staff and raise awareness of the changes. The enaction of these orders was presumably overseen by the “Complaints and Welsh Language Compliance Lead“. I wonder how many know that it was he himself that was guilty of the breach? In a meeting he arranged between myself and two elected members, he failed to organise a translator for the only non-Welsh speaker in the rooom, a councillor who felt so disadvantaged that he asked me to use English, expecting “out of respect” that I give up my legal right to use Welsh with other Welsh-speakers. The Compliance Lead insisted there was no duty to arrange a translator for the benefit of the councillor and continued to refute the complaint as the Commissioner investigated. Neverthelesse, the statutory investigagion found the officer the Council had not only failed to comply with its obligations under the Welsh-language standards but had also failed to follow its own staff guidance. All that time and effort of going through a statutory investigation just because the Compliance Lead refused to acknowledge he’d failed to comply.

The blind leading the blind? Absolutely. A previous statutory investigation by the Commissioner into other breaches went as far as to say lack of leadership was to blame.

There’s also clearly a lack of scrutiny. As they are, with their carefully selected content, these monitoring reports are a waste of time.

[zinger]

What a waste of time. Who are the ones to suffer? Not the people in the meeting that’s for sure. I hope that it wasn’t funded by the taxpayer.

[IMHO]

All that about using Welsh and not English yet, you choose to write it all in English. Why is that?

[Author]

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