I’m sure this would do wonders for Cornish as well—if there were to be one or two (or three) Cornish-language schools established with ‘new money’ so that they would have modern facilities and become desirable places for an education. And just as a side-effect, more children would be learning Cornish.
Sadly I think there are not enough people who are both competent Cornish speakers and competent teachers for such an idea to succeed.
So you’d need to put more Cornish speakers through a teacher-training course and/or more teachers through a Cornish course first, to build up a pool of people capable of staffing such schools.
@philipnewton Now there’s an idea — difficult, yes, but not entirely impossible (or at least, we can dream, can’t we?)…
I somehow doubt schools that used nothing but Cornish would be a success, at least not at this stage. But perhaps if a school started with several Cornish language lessons per week from the youngest year level (or kindergarten) upwards, then working up to introducing more Cornish in other classes as well for the older year levels as the students grow more competent (e.g. classes on Cornish history taught in Cornish)… it could conceivably work. It would take, as you say, a lot of money and enough trained and competent teachers, both of which are lacking. But yes, if those schools were well-equipped enough and well supported and had a good enough reputation, they might get somewhere. It’s an idea, anyway.
These ideas are not knew but as Courteney said it takes money. And the tiny of amount of money the language was receiving from westminster has been axed completely a few days ago. Please sign the petition to condemn this decision and demand the reinstatement of it. X https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/128474
Thanks for that, Alice — I’ve signed it and hope others will too. It’s good to see the petition is already more than halfway to at least getting a response from the government. Shows how many people out there care about Kernewek!
