Welsh-medium and bilingual schools: what it actually means

Wales runs three kinds of school by language, and the choice between them is made once, usually at 11, and is hard to reverse. It deserves more thought than it usually gets, and less anxiety.

The scale of it

At January 2025 there were 93,377 pupils, 21% of the maintained sector, in Welsh-medium schools and 23,807, 5%, in dual language schools. The remaining 336,166, 74%, were in English-medium schools. That is 405 Welsh-medium schools, 66 dual language and 933 English-medium, and over 50 of the Welsh-medium schools are secondaries.

The direction of travel is set. The Welsh Government’s Cymraeg 2050 strategy commits to raising the proportion of each school year group in Welsh-medium education from 22% to 30% by 2031, and then to 40% by 2050.

What the new categories mean

The Welsh Language and Education (Wales) Act 2025 creates three statutory language categories for schools: primarily Welsh language, dual language, and primarily English language partly Welsh. Each carries a minimum amount of teaching through Welsh, and the minimum set for them cannot be lower than 80%, 50% and 10% respectively.

The categories are being brought in rather than already settled, so the practical question now is which one the school expects to be designated, and what that will change. Ask directly; schools are working this out and will tell you where they are.

What studying through Welsh involves

Pupils in a Welsh-medium secondary school are taught their subjects in Welsh and sit their exams in Welsh. WJEC produces papers in both languages, so a pupil answers in the language they were taught in, in maths and science as much as in humanities.

The part that surprises parents is the vocabulary. A child learns the technical terms of every subject in Welsh, and if they later move to an English-medium sixth form or an English-language degree, they meet a second set of terms for concepts they already understand. Most manage it easily. It is still a real transition and worth naming in advance rather than discovering in October.

The honest difficulties

Revision material is thinner in Welsh than in English, particularly for the newer courses, so a family should expect to look harder for it. Post-16 provision is narrower: not every school or college runs every A Level through Welsh, and some subjects are taught in a consortium with another school. Schools vary a great deal on this, so ask which subjects yours actually runs through Welsh at 16 to 18, not whether it can in principle.

None of that is an argument against Welsh-medium education. It is an argument for asking three specific questions instead of one general one.

What Fincho does

Pip works in the language the student is being taught in, so revision of a Welsh-medium science course happens in the vocabulary the exam will use, and practice questions come in the style of the awarding body and are marked against the mark scheme. Where a topic has thin material in Welsh, it says so rather than quietly switching language.