Good afternoon.

1. Will the Cabinet Secretary outline the guidance that the Welsh Government is providing to schools on how to improve attendance? OAQ(5)0088(EDU)

Good afternoon, Angela. The ‘All Wales Attendance Framework’ provides standards and guidance for practitioners in improving school attendance across Wales.

I know, Cabinet Secretary, that you and I both share the same view and priority to get as many children into school, as often as possible. But there is one small area that does concern me, and that’s the area of children who are persistently sick. I have had a number of constituents come to me, where their children have either had the bad luck to have a series of tonsillitis bouts, where they’ve been off for one or two weeks at a time, or have some kind of condition, such as irritable bowel syndrome. And, because those children’s attendance records are therefore plummeting—these are parents who are involved in their children’s care, involved in their education—they’ve been receiving letters threatening them, telling them that they will need to have strong words with their children and, basically, implying that they are bad parents, and their children are not pulling their weight. Could you please just clarify the guidance that goes out to schools, so that we target those who don’t go to school because they don’t want to go to school, as opposed to those who would like to go to school but can’t go to school, so that these children do not feel under even more pressure? The attendance book has a smiley face on it, and when that smiley face no longer smiles, those children do feel very, very hard pressed.

Thank you, Angela, for raising that point. As you said, both of us would agree that the best thing that we can do for our children’s education is ensure that they attend school on a regular basis. And there’s a direct correlation between regular attendance at schools and outcomes, although, sometimes, it is absolutely necessary for a child to stay at home if they are unwell. And we would not expect those children, or the parents of those children, to be treated in a way that made them feel alienated from school. This is an area that has not been raised with me previously, so I will commit to you this afternoon to have a look at that guidance, and to ask officials whether there is anything more that we can do to supply advice to schools about how they manage the absence of children who are genuinely unwell.

Last year, the Welsh Government published data that showed persistent school absence at its best-ever recorded level, and it’s well known the correlation between attendance and attainment, on many levels. The Cabinet Secretary’s predecessor reported that the Welsh Labour Government had introduced a series of measures in recent years to address school attendance, including for those pupils eligible for free school meals, including the increased pupil deprivation grant, and the Welsh Government’s attendance grant, which supported education consortia in their work within the authorities and in the schools to develop and embed the effective practices to secure longer term improvements in school attendance. Can the Cabinet Secretary outline how the Welsh Government intends to build on this good progress and ensure that no child is left behind because of lack of attendance at school for genuine reasons?

Thank you, Rhianon. As you say, I’m very pleased to acknowledge that the latest data shows that absenteeism from our primary schools remains at the lowest level since the Welsh Government started to collect these figures, and attendance at secondary school continues to improve all the time. And the biggest improvements have, indeed, been for those children who are on free school meals. Their rate of attendance is improving faster than that of the general population. And a lot of that is down to the very hard work of individual schools and the innovative ways in which they work with families to address issues of school attendance. I have asked my officials to work with key stakeholders to identify what more support and what additional guidance we can give to schools, local education authorities, and consortia so we do not lose momentum on this very important aspect of education policy.