Mark Isherwood: ...the Centre for Social Justice urged the UK Government to take into account the five main pathways to poverty—family breakdown, worklessness, drug and alcohol addiction, serious personal debt and educational failure—subsequent to which the UK Government launched its life chances strategy. This starts with the fundamental belief that people in poverty are not liabilities to be managed,...
Mark Isherwood: ...employers in Wales, to create a business compact to promote fairer access to high-quality employment, and said businesses should be encouraged to engage strategically with young people in schools, adhere to best practice on internships and apprenticeships; reform the selection process to eliminate unconscious bias; open up well-structured non-graduate routes to high-quality careers;...
Mark Isherwood: .... That can only be because of the matters delivered at a devolved level in Wales over the last 17 years. So, how do you respond to recommendation 2? ‘Improve the quality of the workforce in schools…Ensuring that children have access to high-quality teachers in all subjects is fundamental to improving their life chances’. They said, ‘The first step to achieving this is to make...
Mark Isherwood: ...the last week, how tense matters became, because we as members of the committee that scrutinised it at Stage 1 had said the Minister should amend the Bill to make provision for compulsory whole-school age-appropriate education programmes on healthy relationships, and we still hadn’t achieved that at Stage 3. The Minister came forward with some concessions that enabled the Bill to go...
Mark Isherwood: ...cuts to funding for specialist intervention services supporting families through their relationship breakdown will impact on other services, generating far higher costs, for example, for health, education and social services; or the 9 per cent cut to local county voluntary charities, which Flintshire Local Voluntary Council said in a letter to me would devastate their ability to support...
