4. 3. Statement: Resilient Communities

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:18 pm on 11 October 2016.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Carl Sargeant Carl Sargeant Labour 3:18, 11 October 2016

Yes, I’m very happy to do so. It’s a really useful question. In terms of the children’s zones, we are offering statements of intent from local authorities now to come forward with their ideas in terms of how they would like to implement them. Indeed, I think I’m right in saying that Anglesey have already indicated about an ACE-free island, which is quite an impressive challenge for them to undertake. I think it’s ambitious, but there’s nothing wrong with ambition. We should help them to move towards that. I think we should be starting to think about the approach that Simon Thomas and John Griffiths talked about, so, children’s zones around schools and school areas, to try to see if we can get underneath that. There’s a great example of a school in Washington that did this. It turned a school completely around—a very dysfunctional school—and they concentrated on the ACE approach to intervention and turned this around into a high-performing school. So, it does work. But, at the moment, pilot schemes—lots of flexibility to see what works and what doesn’t work. I think I need to be brave enough to say, ‘Well, we’ll give that a go, and, if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.’ But I’ll take the political flak for that, for doing something for the right reason, as opposed to for not trying some of these. We’ve got to try these in rural and urban settings and see what we can do in terms of scale as well. So, it’s a lot to work on, but we are offering local authorities flexibility to understand their communities better and know what they need.