I was born and raised in the village of Gwynfryn in the 70's & 80's. The village school was English, the neighbouring Bwlchgwyn school was English. I travelled daily as a 6 year old, alone, by crosville bus to ysgol Bodhyfryd in Wrecsam to get my Welsh medium education. At 14 https://twitter.com/marshallmedia/status/1288228681148702721

I remember standing in the King's Head Bwlchgwyn as my dad spoke Welsh to a local man and father of one of my older sisters friend. The village was full of these people, farmers, steel workers and ex miners who were Welsh speakers who never passed on Welsh to their kids because

it wasn't an option in the local school and that generation thought bringing up their children monolingually would be somehow beneficial to them, something we now know to be opposite. But Bwlchgwyn and Gwynfryn were Welsh communities in every way bar the language. Village

Fetes, bonfire night and wonderful Christmas parties in the village community centre. We had 5 pubs, yes FIVE, a village shop and post office. Then I remember things started to change. New, small estates popped up in one acre fields in Bwlchgwyn and Gwynfryn, the village shop

closed, the pubs went quiet, even though the population was increasing. The events and parties stopped. Why? Brymbo steelworks demise played a part. They stopped being communities, they became places where people lived and travelled from to work in Liverpool and Manchester

People shopped in supermarkets on their way home, they created new social groupings, I remember a "21 club" where these new residents would socialise with each other, creating mini ghettos. The change in these communities wasn't linguistic it was social. Had the local

schools been Welsh medium, would the outcome be different? We'll never know, but those people who moved in the eighties, and knew nothing of their Welsh heritage, where barely half a decade before practically everyone could speak Welsh despite no Welsh in school. These

people grew up knowing very little about the places they lived in, despite their Welsh names and oddities like Fron Heulog Hill (which translates as sunny hill hill) and growing up in what was, to them, suburbs of Manchester and Liverpool. This is why Welsh medium education

should be an option in EVERY community in Wales, especially those where the language has lost its ground. Diolch