Bethan Sayed: When you say people should be school-ready, what I'm hearing from people in schools is that people are arriving at school without being able to read on any level, and many parents not communicating with children as they potentially would have, because of new technology. It does help, in many instances, with reading, but often it militates against their development. What are you doing to try...
Bethan Sayed: Thank you for that reply. The policy of school reorganisation and the creation of the centralisation of superschools, particularly in Neath Port Talbot and across Wales, has caused some concern, particularly with the potential closure of Cymer Afan Comprehensive School in my region. It's particularly acute in relation to the Active Travel (Wales) Act 2013, and it's going against that, because...
Bethan Sayed: 3. How does the Welsh Government plan to develop an education system that reflects the objectives of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015? OAQ51835
Bethan Sayed: ...it would be useful for us as AMs to understand what those deliberations were. I say it in the context of having been at a public meeting last night, where there are proposals to close Cymer Afan school in the Afan valley. We appreciate that the taskforce isn't just to do with education, but if you do close the school, it will take away the heart of the community, and therefore may lead to...
Bethan Sayed: Thank you. Page 8 of 'Education in Wales' discusses the need for a strong commitment to effective collaboration as well as the integration of services where appropriate. Could you expand on what the opportunities to collaborate more effectively are in terms of colleges and schools? For example, the Welsh Government used to fund 14 to 19-year-old fora through the medium of Welsh, and this did...
Bethan Sayed: 6. Will the Cabinet Secretary outline plans to improve further education to support more people to gain qualifications in Wales? OAQ51681
Bethan Sayed: ...into prison; they got involved in it when they were incarcerated. So, I think we need to get a reality check on that too. Rehabilitation in prison works best on a smaller scale. It's the same in schools—it's not a new concept. If you have a smaller class size, you have more attention from the teacher. If you have a smaller class in prison to be able to be rehabilitated by that person,...
Bethan Sayed: ...strategy, as many other countries have, because aspects of child poverty cross-cut beyond economic issues, particularly relating to local government, social services and housing, for example, and education, education equalities, and intervention for children in a crisis, for example. So, we’re not satisfied that there is no need for that individualised strategy in relation to child...
Bethan Sayed: ...last 30 to 40 years, and when we consider that the banks we do have are now fast disappearing from high streets and smaller towns, now more than ever, an alternative is needed. Along with greater education surrounding financial inclusion, which I have been privileged to work on, more needs to be done to promote credit unions as part of better financial education and tackling inequality and...
Bethan Sayed: ...from Race Equality First and from the Ethnic Youth Support Team in Swansea. Those particular ideas were focusing on teacher training to deal with hate-related incidents and interventions in school. I think what’s important to recognise is that people’s social views are framed from a very young age, and what I found from the Ethnic Youth Support Team in Swansea, when I visited there a...
Bethan Sayed: ...that process that the ONS are happy with that, because, of course, you’ve presented a Bill, but you’ve only had a reaction to it as it stands? When we’ve discussed this before on the education committee in the previous Assembly, where we had reclassification of further education and higher education, we did have a private briefing from the ONS, but we didn’t have something on the...
Bethan Sayed: ..., I think it’s helped, in a way, to have a debate in the same week, for us to be able to look at this issue in a comprehensive way. I thank Suzy Davies for her contribution. What you said about education for adults struck me—about closing our eyes to the adults of today in order to help adults in the future. I hope we don’t close our eyes entirely for the adults of today, because...
Bethan Sayed: ...to look at the practicalities of how this radical policy can be successfully implemented. We took a wide range of evidence, including informal external engagement sessions with stakeholders and school pupils across Wales. It is clear from considering the evidence that success will require hard work, considerable additional resources and clear targets. It will also need to be founded on the...
Bethan Sayed: ...it is profiled and when he will make further announcements on additional resources? If I turn to recommendation 11, which called on the Welsh Government to set out in detail how it intends to move schools along the language continuum, and how this will address any concerns from parents and the wider community. The Government response, quite rightly, focused on the role of local authorities...
Bethan Sayed: I was wondering how you could tell us more about how young people are engaged with the issue surrounding homelessness in school. I’m obviously aware of the Shelter Cymru toolkit, which is widely used across schools in Wales, but I wonder how that can be enhanced upon, because we had a debate only last week from young people in Wrexham—not Wrexham, sorry—Ynys Môn, who came down to the...
Bethan Sayed: ...able to have been sustainable. That’s the type of thing we really need to ensure for a natural and grass-roots journalism sector in Wales to flourish. With regard to the investment in music in education, I believe it’s £2 million over two years. That’s something, again, that I’m very grateful for. Again, how can we be involved in shaping where that funding goes and how it’s...
Bethan Sayed: First Minister, on Friday I was with the ethnic youth support team in Swansea, and they were saying that they would like to have much more support going into schools and education venues in regard to trying to get communities to work together. And so, in one school, they had a white girl wearing a hijab, and she walked down the street, and then she came back and said how different she felt...
Bethan Sayed: ...and strategy. I’m asking because I’ve had contact from a furniture company in Port Talbot that bid for contracts with Bridgend County Borough Council. They’ve put furniture in quite a lot of schools across Wales, but they weren’t even allowed to put in a bid to Bridgend County Borough Council, because they said they didn’t have the experience or criteria to be able to do so....
Bethan Sayed: I was wondering what work you had done in relation to community relations and schools that are community focused. For example, in my area—and others’—we’ve got a new superschool in Ysgol Bae Baglan. They were told before the school was built, amalgamating different communities around that area, that they would be able to access provision—be able to access the field—for activities,...
Bethan Sayed: I wanted to ask specifically about your conversations with the new organisation National Youth Arts Wales. I was speaking to tutors at Gartholwg school, when we went as part of the committee inquiry on music, with Dawn Bowden, and one of the tutors said to me, ‘My daughter is applying for the European orchestra because she can afford to do that more than she can afford the fees for the...
