Mark Drakeford: Investment of almost £26 million has been approved to date for Islwyn through the twenty-first century schools and education programme. The funding is earmarked for a new 1,050-place comprehensive school for the area.
Mark Drakeford: ...in west and north Wales, through the lens of Local Government. Local Government has been central to the implementation of national policies and, particularly, to the provision of the Welsh-language education system. We owe an enormous debt to Local Government. Local Authorities in west Wales—the Isle of Anglesey, Gwynedd, Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire—have been proactive in their...
Mark Drakeford: ...Welsh are skills that we appreciate and are skills that will be important to them when they create their own futures. I’m sure, when I’ve been speaking to young people, people who receive their education through the medium of Welsh, that it’s important to persuade them that the fact that they can speak Welsh is something that they can sell in the workplace. It’s something, not just...
Mark Drakeford: Can I thank Mike for those questions? He points to one of the fantastic phenomenons of our time—the growth of Welsh-medium education. Here in the city of Cardiff, when I first chaired South Glamorgan’s Welsh-medium working group in the 1980s, the number of young people who were obtaining an education through the medium of Welsh was literally a fraction of the number that are there today....
Mark Drakeford: ...the nations of Europe. Just as we heard from Eluned at the start, I think of my own family. Both of my grandfathers were combatants in the first world war. I vividly remember, as a child in primary school, being told by eyewitnesses of the sight of Swansea burning from Carmarthen, 30 miles away. When I heard that story fewer years had gone by since those awful events than have gone by...
Mark Drakeford: ...thinking. My starting point, Dirprwy Lywydd, is this: that good local government plays a vitally important part in the lives of almost every citizen in Wales, from the earliest years of nursery education and the foundation phase to the social care provided to our oldest and most vulnerable. As Mike Hedges suggested, each one of us has a direct interest in the way in which our rubbish is...
Mark Drakeford: ...to vote tomorrow for Wales to continue to be connected into a European Union that is vital to the present and future prosperity of Wales, that promotes and protects our businesses, our children’s education, our environment and the services that we rely on, that protects our workers’ rights, that is clear that environmental damage does not stop at borders and that progress against...
Mark Drakeford: ...of the things that have brought us to where we are. The very first meeting of the TUC, the Trades Union Congress, happened in 1868. On its agenda: wage inequalities, workers’ hours, technical education and threats to jobs and workers’ rights. So, it’s a long haul from 1868 to today, but the agendas in many ways stay remarkably the same, and the challenges for trade unionism...
Mark Drakeford: ...to transforming the expectations, experiences and outcomes for all learners, including those with additional learning needs. The forthcoming introduction of the Additional Learning Needs and Education Tribunal (Wales) Bill will be a key milestone in the transformation journey that is already under way.
Mark Drakeford: ...to make a statement today on the proposals for the reform of local government. Local government plays a vital part in the lives of every citizen in Wales. Councils provide the services that educate our children, look after our elderly, dispose of our waste, and light our streets. They go on doing so, moreover, during a period that the Institute for Fiscal Studies has called an...
Mark Drakeford: I thank the Member for the questions. I agree with his starting point that people who work in our local authorities in Wales are, by and large, people with families, with children who go to school, with mortgages to pay, and the uncertainty has not been good for them, and that’s why I’m very keen to try and create a consensus about a way ahead. If the committee choose to take an interest...
Mark Drakeford: Education remains a central priority for this Government.
Mark Drakeford: ...to transforming the expectations, experiences and outcomes for all learners, including those with additional learning needs. The forthcoming introduction of the additional learning needs and education tribunal (Wales) Bill will be a key milestone in the transformation journey that is already under way.
Mark Drakeford: ...until tomorrow, when I will lay the local government proposed settlement, to see how that affects individual authorities. I was grateful for what he said about the importance of further and higher education. The £30 million that we have been able to find additionally for HE and FE will be deployed by the Cabinet Secretary for Education, and she will do so in a way that is consistent with...
Mark Drakeford: ...an impact on our delivery partners. I was keen to provide an 18-month period of stability for those key services, and they need to use that time to prepare for the choices that lie ahead. As far as education is concerned, I’m very happy to provide a copy of my leaflet on progressive universalism—[Laughter.]—which I’m sure the Member would enjoy. It is very important that we...
Mark Drakeford: Certainly, I agree with Vikki Howells in her commendation of RCT council, and indeed councils across Wales for the way in which they have embraced the twenty-first century schools programme. Over 150 schools and colleges across Wales are seeing rebuilding and refurbishment of their premises. But the point that my colleague made in her supplementary towards the end is perhaps the more...
Mark Drakeford: ...the city is part of a wider pattern in which they’ve used money, made available through the Welsh Government in part, for street lighting energy efficiency, council building energy efficiency and school lighting programmes—in Rhydypenau Primary School in her own constituency, for example. It is a very good example of the way in which local authorities are using the assistance available...
Mark Drakeford: Of course I agree that the formula should rely on the most up-to-date data possible. That’s why I was pleased to agree the recommendations in relation to population numbers and school pupil numbers. I think every effort is made, both by local authority partners and those who advise them, to make sure that the formula does depend on the most reliable data available. During my visits around...
Mark Drakeford: ...for Families First and Flying Start and trying to make sure that we have more of an impact in those communities that she so regularly represents on the floor of the National Assembly. As far as education programmes are concerned, there were two programmes, time-limited in nature, for which no funding provision would normally have been made next year. In the circumstances we find ourselves,...
Mark Drakeford: ...he was here in the Assembly last week. I told him that I wanted to move to a system where electoral registration becomes much more of an automatic process, and that that could apply particularly to school students, so that we could make sure that 16 and 17-year-olds were on the register to vote. I want to look at ways in which people’s voting can be made easier: electronic voting,...
