Parental attitudes to Gaelic‐medium education in the Western Isles of Scotland

Abstract

Gaelic‐medium education is an optional extension of the bilingual policy which has been applied to all schools of the Western Isles during the 1980s. The bilingual policy is that Gaelic‐speaking children will be as literate and fluent in Gaelic as in English by P7, and that provision will be made at all stages of primary education for English‐speaking children to learn Gaelic as a second language in accordance with the wishes of their parents. The first Gaelic‐medium unit teaching school entrants through Gaelic across the curriculum opened in 1986 and the number of such units within primary schools has since risen to 11. This questionnaire and interview survey shows that Gaelic is no longer the language of the home for a majority of parents of pre‐school children, who are nevertheless very positive that their children should be bilingual by the end of primary school. About half seemed to be prepared to enrol their children in Gaelic‐medium units if these were provided, although there was a degree of uncertainty about the nature of Gaelic‐medium education as distinct from bilingual education.