Mr Neil Hamilton: I'm deeply shocked by these amendments. The enthusiasm with which Llyr Gruffydd advocated them reminds us of the ministries of propaganda and public enlightenment in former eras. Education should be about teaching children to question, think and use their judgment, and yet what we're invited to do here is to impose some kind of received truth upon children, whereas there is in fact hotly...
Mr Neil Hamilton: ...hurtles towards the iceberg, and that's for two reasons. First of all, the Government's budget is of course restrained by the restrictions imposed by the UK Government, but also because health and education gobble up by far the lion's share of the total budget in Wales, more than 75 per cent, so there is a limit to the discretionary expenditure that the Government has at its disposal,...
Mr Neil Hamilton: Will the First Minister outline the extent to which the Education Act 1996 has influenced Welsh Government policy in the fifth Senedd?
Mr Neil Hamilton: ...affirmative one. Well, I think this is an unfortunate way in which to proceed. But an essential knowledge of Britain's past, I think, is being replaced by politically correct topics in some of our educational institutions, and some of the most important influential historical events are ignored or downplayed—things like the English civil war, the industrial revolution, horrors of the...
Mr Neil Hamilton: ...taught, it is taught in an objective way, or as objective a way as is possible. I strongly support the petition on a common corpus of knowledge of the history of Wales. I studied Welsh history in school, and history then was taught in perhaps a rather different way from the way it's taught now, but I think it is very important for people to learn about their place in the history of their...
Mr Neil Hamilton: ...income of 75 per cent of the UK average. We've got three quarters of the population covered by health boards that are either in special measures or targeted intervention. We've got the worst education results in the United Kingdom, according to the PISA tables. Devolution powers have been used by the Welsh Government in the last 20 years, but not in the direction that could have made...
Mr Neil Hamilton: ...-day complexity that requires very subtle and sensitive handling. And I'm sorry to say that the attitude that she seemed to evince in her speech is actually being followed, at the moment, in our schools in Wales. I was recently sent, by a concerned parent from south Wales, some homework that was set for a seven-year-old child, about which this parent was very concerned. Because it had...
Mr Neil Hamilton: ...SARS did, for no reason that is apparent at all. Six months after SARS appeared on the planet, it disappeared. Professor David Heymann, a professor in infectious disease epidemiology at the London school of tropical health and tropical medicine, who headed the global response to SARS at the World Health Organization, has pointed out that SARS spread easily and killed a tenth of those who...
Mr Neil Hamilton: ...to reduce the incidence of ACEs by 70 per cent by 2030. Every single Member of this Assembly, apart from Government Ministers, has signed up to this—with the exception of the Minister for Education, who has signed up to it—does he think that we're all wrong? Would it not be an advantage to able to have a target? Because although one accepts the Government don't always meet their...
Mr Neil Hamilton: The Minister is a massive supporter of the European Convention on Human Rights, and article 2 of protocol 1 says that if the state exercises any functions in relation to education and teaching, it 'shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.' What she's just said, of course, rides coach and...
Mr Neil Hamilton: 7. Will the Minister provide an update on relationship teaching in schools? OAQ55087
Mr Neil Hamilton: ..., which has no responsibility for the day-to-day running of the health service. But it does give him a convenient opportunity to pass the buck, and therefore, avoid taking responsibility. The education system—we're consistently at the bottom of the Programme for International Student Assessment league tables. He was a keen advocate of the people's vote during the referendum campaign on...
Mr Neil Hamilton: ...-class politicians in Cardiff Bay when there are real needs outside? As the blogger Jac o' the North has perhaps more pithily described it: 'A country with homeless on the streets, where kids go to school hungry, where people die waiting for ambulances, apparently has millions of pounds to spare so that dilettante English activists and useless Welsh politicians can feel better about...
Mr Neil Hamilton: ...cause for self-congratulation. Having said that, I do acknowledge, obviously, that the Minister has achieved something worth while—she has arrested a long period of decline in standards in Welsh schools. With Wales languishing below the other countries of the UK after 20 years of the existence of this Assembly, I don't think that any education Minister could rightly expect to be pleased,...
Mr Neil Hamilton: ...able to bear such burdens, and we know that there are many pressing issues in Wales. The Programme for International Student Assessment results are going to show, yet again, that we have the worst education results in the country. The state of the health service, again, is an absolute scandal, with five of our seven health boards in special measures or targeted intervention. If we're going...
Mr Neil Hamilton: ...from Cardiff, and continues to be disastrously mismanaged from Cardiff? We could take devolution even further down to the people than here in Cardiff. We could have further devolution in the education system as well, and put the education Minister out of a job. We could give more powers to local authority to take an independent view of the way they want to manage their own schools within...
Mr Neil Hamilton: .... She'll recall that a short time ago, the leader of Neath Port Talbot council described the improvement consortium in his area in less than glowing terms. He said that it was set up to improve schools but the opposite had happened: the schools that needed improving haven't, and those schools that were doing well have dipped in improvement. The Association of School and College Leaders...
Mr Neil Hamilton: 5. What recent discussions has the Minister had with the Welsh school improvement consortia? OAQ54367
Mr Neil Hamilton: ...candour, said that the Labour Government has no real idea what it's doing with the economy. The state of the health service proves it has no idea what it's doing in health, and the state of the education service means that it has no idea what it's doing in education either.
Mr Neil Hamilton: ...12 years left to prevent 1.5 degrees of warming. I'm old enough to remember the invention of the environment as a political issue at the end of the 1960s, and indeed the very first United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization conference on Earth Day in 1970. And it's very entertaining to look back at the predictions that were made at that conference, including one from...
