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ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the factors influencing the likelihood of choice of Gaelic-medium primary education in Scotland by means of the analysis of a national survey of public attitudes conducted in 2012. Binary logistic regression is used to investigate the association of five dimensions found in previous literature to be associated with the choice of Scottish Gaelic-medium education: (i) demographic characteristics, (ii) exposure to Gaelic, (iii) cultural and national identities, (iv) views on the future of Gaelic and (v) views on Gaelic in education. The present research found views about Gaelic in education and views on the future of Gaelic to have the greatest explanatory power in predicting likelihood of choice of Gaelic-medium education, for demographic characteristics and ‘cultural and national identities’ to have substantial explanatory power, and for exposure to Gaelic to have low explanatory power. The paper uses Baker’s three contexts for the growth of bilingual education in Wales – bilingual education as language planning, as pedagogy and as politics – as its explanatory framework, and shows that these three contexts also underpin the potential growth of Gaelic-medium education in Scotland. Potential implications for policy and for methodological approaches to studying choice of bilingual education are presented.
ORCiD
Fiona O'Hanlon http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8387-3303
Notes
1 The importance of Gaelic education to the maintenance of Gaelic in Scotland is underlined by 2011 census figures, which show levels of inter-generational transmission of Gaelic to be low. Only 0.4% of 0–2 year olds were reported to have any Gaelic-language skills, compared to a national incidence across age groups of 1.7% (NRS, Citation2015, p. 11).
2 The analysis presented in Section 4 was also conducted using the dichotomy ‘very likely’ to choose Gaelic-medium education and ‘other responses’ (consisting of the categories ‘fairly likely’, ‘not very likely’ and ‘not at all likely’). The pattern of results was the same, with no coefficient that was significant in one analysis changing direction (from negative to positive, or vice versa) in the other analysis. The analysis based on the ‘very likely’ and ‘other responses’ dichotomy is available from the authors on request.
3 In the appendix, statistical significance is assessed at the 10% level.
4 The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation uses 37 indicators in the seven domains of Current income, Employment, Health, Education skills and training, Geographic access to services, Housing, and Crime to measure the level of deprivation across Scotland by data-zone (a small geographic area with 500–1000 residents).
5 The Highlands and Islands are the areas of Scotland with the highest density of Gaelic speakers. All civil parishes (small areas of Scotland which originally represented a church parish) with 5% or more of the population reporting themselves to be Gaelic speakers exist within the Highlands and Islands (in the North-West of Scotland) (NRS, Citation2015, p. 31).
6 The relationship of variables within Dimensions 1–4 to Baker’s (Citation2000) three contexts – of education as pedagogy, language planning, and politics – will be discussed in Section 5.
7 That is to say, inserting the interactive effect removed the statistical significance associated with the original variable.
8 The ‘other’ category within this variable is small (53 respondents) and thus the evidence relating to it is not reliable.
9 As noted earlier, the methodological exception here is Stockdale et al. (Citation2003).
10 In the school year 2014–2015 the SIMD distribution of Gaelic-medium primary pupils by home postcode was: 9% (highest deprivation quintile), 24%, 36%, 19%, 11% (lowest deprivation quintile) [n = 2901]. The distribution in English-medium education was: 23% (highest deprivation quintile), 19%, 19%, 20%, 18% [n = 373,794] (Scottish Government, Citation2016).
11 The appendix shows that household income and social class were also associated with the dependent variable: with greater social disadvantage associated with greater likelihood of choice of Gaelic-medium education.