Adam Price: ...meant to represent a step change in thinking, away from the old grant culture and towards, instead, a more strategic approach to creating the conditions for economic success, rather than the old school of, basically, economic success coming through the stroke of a ministerial pen and money being doled out to individual companies. It was also meant to be more strategic in focusing on some...
Adam Price: ...of Plaid Cymru in terms of scope and substance, but even more importantly, ones that will lead to real improvements in the lives of people in all parts of Wales; £30 million for higher and further education, and I was pleased to see Paul Davies welcome that; £50 million for the tourism sector that we heard mention of; and an additional £5 million for the Welsh language and so on. The...
Adam Price: 3. Will the Minister make a statement on the National Schools Categorisation System? OAQ(5)0044(EDU)
Adam Price: I thank the Cabinet Secretary for her answer. We have exchanged correspondence on this issue over the summer, therefore she’ll be aware that I have met with a headmaster in a local primary school who had conveyed concerns to me about the possibility for schools to present data in a misleading way in order to improve their categorisation. Now, in her response to me, the Minister said that...
Adam Price: ...of the more radical change that will be necessary over the years ahead. We’re looking particularly in the Plaid Cymru agreement at those sectors that have had serial cuts over many years: higher education; further education, which is underfunded; the arts sector; local government, with the first cash rise since 2013-14; and mental health spending, where I know there is consensus across...
Adam Price: ...process. We succeeded, through the agreement, to secure additional funding for sectors that have, in our view, suffered financially over the past few years—sectors such as further and higher education, the arts, the Welsh language and local government, capital investment for diagnostic equipment, as we heard in the statement over Christmas, and funding for mental health, and so on. And,...
Adam Price: ...are associated with economic success? There were some surprising results—or maybe not so surprising—which actually showed that one of the most important variables is the level of expenditure on education. Indeed, as Professor Holtham has said in the last few weeks, rather than actually raiding the education budget, as we’ve done in recent years to actually inflate our conventional...
Adam Price: ...a year ago, his predecessor commissioned a second-stage report on creating a dedicated national innovation body for Wales, to drive up our level of R&D, both in the private sector and in higher education. Can he report on some progress on the establishment of that body, and can he also respond to some information that I’ve had that suggests that the full-time director of innovation,...
Adam Price: One of the frustrations is that qualified students from Wales who want to be trained in Wales in our medical schools don’t have the opportunity to undertake that training. When we look at the percentages in England, 80 per cent of the students in medical schools are from England, 50 per cent in Scotland, for example, but only 20 per cent in Wales. Could we guarantee that all Welsh domiciled...
Adam Price: ...middle east, and Africa—key sectors where there are particular opportunities identified. It’s a whole-of-Government approach, which also incorporates other bilateral relationships, including education, culture and development aids, et cetera. Now, the Cabinet Secretary will be aware that the most recent export statistics show that, even though Wales has a healthy trade surplus...
Adam Price: In Finland, they have no school inspection, no league tables, no tests or exams up until the age of 16, homework per child is limited to half an hour as a maximum, and they have the most successful education system in the world. That was the model that we were meant to be adopting and yet we start testing at seven and we’ve imported wholesale the overregulated, overworked, overstressed...
Adam Price: ...innovation body for Wales, similar to what the Scandinavian nations have. I understand that the suggestion being made now is that innovation should be given as a responsibility to the new tertiary education body. The risk with that is that the higher education dimension gets its proper place, but at the expense of the kind of broader economic issues that Lee Waters referred to.
Adam Price: ...you have to have a magnet. Read your Michael Porter. The Welsh Government, I think, paid him £250,000 for a cluster strategy in 2002; I got him for free when I studied with him in Harvard Business School. And what he would tell you is, ‘Look, clusters cannot be conjured out of thin air’. The whole point about the Circuit of Wales is that it created an open-air laboratory, a test rink,...
Adam Price: ...that house said ‘Housing and jobs to save the language’. It was true then, of course, in terms of the pressure on affordable housing, but it’s so much truer now. We tend to overemphasise the educational elements and the familial elements in terms of language transfer. But for me, the workplace was the catalyst that meant that I became fluent in the Welsh language, because I came...
Adam Price: ...very pleased to be able to speak at a Seren network event in Llanelli on Friday. I think all of us would want to encourage as many Welsh students as possible to apply for these two world-leading education institutions, but also to others in the same category as well—to Trinity College Dublin, to the Sorbonne, to Heidelberg, to Tübingen, and further afield to Princeton, Stanford and to...
Adam Price: ..., was the continuity of the austerian economics, I suppose we could call it. We could call it that, but there are few economists of any repute who actually would support it now—even the Austrian School actually wouldn't support the kind of austerian economics we're seeing from this Government. And there's a very, very good reason why. It's because we are entering, I think, some of the...
Adam Price: ...lines. It's an interesting time that we are living in when Andy Haldane from the Bank of England says that the question of our time is labour's share in the economy, almost sounding like an old-school Marxian economist. That is the fundamental question. Globally, labour's share in the economy is falling, and that's why I would appeal to those on the Labour benches. You need to focus on...
Adam Price: .... You demoted the post of director of innovation within Welsh Government. You're abolishing the innovation advisory council and you're going to replace it with a sub-committee of the new tertiary education body, even though research quoted by the Be The Spark initiative, which you support, points out that 97 per cent of innovation in Wales doesn't happen on the lab benches of our...
Adam Price: The Cabinet Secretary will probably be aware of Coleg Elidyr, which is a specialist further education college in my constituency. I was wondering if the Cabinet Secretary would be prepared to look again at amending the terminology used in the draft code to describe institutions like Coleg Elidyr, which is more in line with that which the sector would prefer but also Estyn as well. I'm happy...
Adam Price: .... But through the negotiations, we have been able, for example, to have the largest ever investment for the Welsh language. The Cabinet Secretary announced today two tranches of £30 million for schools, and £20 million of revenue funding as well in the draft budget: the largest ever investment in order to meet the aim for the middle of this century. There are local, regional...
