I would like to—not for the first time—raise the issue of community-focused schools, which I continue to believe is very important to the performance of our education system in Wales. I think one issue that Estyn has raised in its report, and consistently raises, is variability in the education system in Wales. That variability applies to community-focused schools. Some schools are very good in engaging with families and the wider community, others not so good. I do believe that it really matters. Many people, I think, are rightly annoyed to see schools shut off from the community in the evenings, at weekends and school holidays. It’s a waste of resource at a time of great strain on public finances, and it’s not doing that job of engaging with families and the community that should be consistently taking place right across Wales.

It does come home to me, Llywydd, many times in my own constituency—and I’m sure it’s the case all across Wales—that very often there is, in some families and some communities, not a sufficient valuing of education and not a sufficient commitment to education that we would all like to see. So, that reflects itself in school attendance. I often hear people saying that, for example, their children have achieved 95 per cent attendance as if that’s something or a rate to be proud of, when of course that means missing far too much school. Indeed, there are many worse attendance rates than that. It manifests itself, I believe, in a lack of support sometimes for children doing their homework, revising properly for exams, and it lowers ambitions in terms of higher education. So, one thing I frequently hear—too frequently—is that you can go to university and you may still end up without a job, or without a job that is any more rewarding than the job you might have got had you not gone to university. So, I think we cannot generalise, but there are some families and people in some of our communities where these sorts of attitudes are too prevalent. One way of cutting across them is to genuinely and consistently engage with those families and those communities, even given that some families had a bad experience of education themselves and may view schools as very middle-class institutions, largely full of middle-class professionals that they do not particularly feel confident in engaging with, or perhaps even want to engage with. So, there are real barriers—difficult barriers—that have to be broken down. But, Llywydd, the only way that that will happen, with consistency, will be if there’s a strong drive, I would say, and leadership from the Welsh Government, working with local authorities, school governing bodies, educational professionals and others to achieve the consistency that we need to see. I do believe that it’s necessary to establish a mechanism, whatever it might be, to ensure that consistency and a lack of variability right across Wales.

I often hear from governors and school heads that the caretaker might want some extra money to open up the school—it’s never much money, but that’s seen as an issue—and that there are security issues on site if the school is open to the community. Again, that’s not an issue that cannot be overcome with the right sort of will and commitment. Indeed, I think many schools find that opening up the site actually is an aid to security, because there are people around more often when the school is closed to ensure that people cannot do things without being seen, and acts are witnessed.

It’s not just about twenty-first century schools, Llywydd, either. It’s about the existing school stock. So, if we are going to have the consistency that we need right across Wales, it has to be a mechanism that achieves progress in the existing school stock, not only the twenty-first century schools. So, I would be very grateful if the Cabinet Secretary could say something in her contribution to this debate that would give me some comfort that we may see that consistency achieved and a mechanism in place as quickly as possible.