[Danny]

What a nasty-minded and spiteful little country we gave become. Presumably the paediatric surgeon was there to help their child and this is how they respond to one word in a letter from him/her. Scoring virtue points against someone who has decided to do a job of work that helps people. Disgusting.

[romille]

What a nasty-minded and spiteful little country we gave become. Presumably the paediatric surgeon was there to help their child and this is how they respond to one word in a letter from him/her. Scoring virtue points against someone who has decided to do a job of work that helps people. Disgusting.

This is what the compensation culture and social media does to society, everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame, to increase their list of Twitter followers and gain more virtual friends on Faceache, whilst hopefully making some gain doing so.

[kanga]

..

That limits the number of teachers who can work in those schools then. Like the insistence in many Welsh schools on teachers being able to speak Welsh. "Sorry, you might be a Master Teacher in Computer Science but you can't work here unless you learn to do it in Welsh/Mandarin/French/Swahili". I'm a huge fan of multilinguality, but not at the expense of other important subjects.

Er, I assume it means only that at this school there is ONE teacher who can teach Mandarin, in English, to each class at different times on the scheduled timetable. And, quite possibly, other subjects, also in English, at other times. Apologies if this was not clear.

[Lindsayp]

Kanga, sorry if I misunderstood but my point applies equally and it seems more precisely to Wales where I am not able to take a teaching job if I should move there because I don’t speak Welsh - I would naturally learn the lingo by choice but it seems to me that this must be at least an important factor in the problem of not being able to recruit talented teachers and especially head teachers in that country.
Sorry for slight thread drift.

[Paul_Sengupta]

Is this a new thing? I have a whole family full of teachers who all teach/taught in Wales, and as far as I know, only two or three of them speak Welsh.

Though I only found out one teacher/farmer cousin spoke Welsh after I saw her doing an interview on S4C!

[Lindsayp]

Maybe I'm talking tosh then, but when I was looking into moving to North Wales a couple of years ago, and supplementing my pension by going back into teaching, it seemed like it was a prerequisite to speak Welsh. Maybe it was the specific counties or schools?

Perhaps I'm just losing the plot.

I'm sure Leia will correct me (in a manner of speaking) if the whole topic isn't on her Ignore list.

[Paul_Sengupta]

North west Wales is different as that's more of a Welsh speaking area. South east Wales is predominantly English speaking.