Welsh Immersion Education – Strategies and approaches to support 3 to 11-year-old learners

This report is in response to a request for advice from the Welsh Government in the Education Minister’s annual remit letter to Estyn for 2021-2022. As requested, it presents information about effective practice in immersion education. It encompasses immersion approaches in the foundation phase in Welsh-medium and bilingual non-maintained settings and primary schools, in addition to immersion approaches for latecomers to Welsh-medium education for 3 to 11-year-old learners. It reports on the findings from visits to a sample of providers across Wales.

Immersion education principles are relevant to the Welsh Government as using immersion methodology can help to contribute to the targets identified in ‘Cymraeg 2050: A million Welsh speakers’. This was outlined specifically when it was stated that ‘curriculum planning and pedagogy will be more informed by research and evidence about effective language teaching and learning, including approaches to language immersion’ (Welsh Government, 2017a).

This report will identify best practice in relation to immersing learners in the Welsh language, while setting the context of the current use of language immersion in Wales. The report builds on work undertaken previously by Estyn, including the recent report Welsh language acquisition (Estyn, 2021) and the report Welsh in key stage 2 and key stage 3 in Welsh-medium or bilingual schools (Estyn, 2018).