I am going to be but a pale imitation, I think, of the last contributor who gave it her usual amount of great gusto.

I am very pleased to participate in this debate, because I think one of the mistakes that we sometimes make is that we think education is linear: children are born, they go to primary school, they skip along to secondary school, they go to FE, HE and pop put the other end and get some kind of job, and then through their job they can do any number of skills. But we’ve got to face facts that an awful lot of children hate school. An awful lot of children have a really miserable time at school. They get bullied, they don’t fit in, and they have a huge amount of other pressures, particularly in secondary school when hormones are wreaking havoc. They may have families that don’t provide them with support. They may be constantly told that they’re stupid or useless or in the way, and they simply don’t perform well. We also have to face facts that about a quarter of our schoolchildren in Wales have some kind of additional learning need, which can range from perhaps a small amount of dyslexia all the way through to a significant and profound social, anger management or mental capacity requirement.

So, our children come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and they all need to find their way in the world through different routes. They simply cannot all follow the same route. And I’ve met a couple of my constituents who have really inspired me with their life stories. One was a young girl who had her first child at 14, the second one at 16. In her very early 20s, she realised she did not want her boys to have the kind of life that she was going through, and so she went back to school. She didn’t have anything, and she went back to part-time and she got her GCSEs, and then she struggled on after a while, and she did A-levels, then she did a—I can’t remember the exact name of the course, but it was some kind of foundation course from the Open University—and she’s now training to be a nurse. And I have utter respect for that woman’s life path.

A young man came to me, honestly, he was about 18 or 19, he could barely string a word together, he’d left school at 14 and all he ever wanted to do was drive a digger. And he had actually earnt enough money to go out and buy a digger when he was about 19, and he had all the requisite whatever licences you need. But his frustration was that he wanted to try and grow it and make it into a business, and we gave him a little bit of help, pointed him to a couple of grants and things like that, and he went off and got a number of courses under his belt. This must have been in about 2009-10, and he has now got business training, he’s got a second digger and he’s starting to employ people. Again, he wouldn’t have done that, he couldn’t do that going through the standard route that so many other people follow. The reason why he was able to do that was he was able to access part-time education. He was able to go out and carry on doing his job, earning some money and he went to night school, he went to Pembrokeshire College, and then he just went on from there.

I think that when we look at adult education, we really need to look at it in a very holistic way and accept that an awful lot of people will not follow the standard routes. So, that was the first bit of this motion I really wanted to talk about: supporting progression for people across the spectrum.

The second element of the motion that I wanted to pick up was around the issue of making older people feel valuable and part of our communities and ensuring that loneliness and isolation, which we talk about again and again and again in this Chamber as one of the great public health ills that’s slowly beginning to be visited on more and more people, we start to combat, and how do we keep people engaged?

I’ve mentioned older people, but, of course, loneliness and isolation can hit you at any age, at any of the transition points in your life. You lose a job, you get a divorce, you are bereaved, something cataclysmic happens and you really struggle. The great thing, again, about being able to go into a part-time course—even if it’s on something that is just a passion and not about learning a skill in order to go out and earn money—is you’re building emotional resilience, you’re building confidence and belief in yourself and you’re making friends. That’s really important because most people need to be able to make friends.

We live very insular lives these days. Some people are incredibly lonely. Never in our society has it been so true to say that we have so many people who are totally lonely in the vast crowd that is the population on our planet. I think that adult education and community education, allowing people, or enabling people, to be able to follow something and feel part of the great jigsaw that is the big life, is really is really, really vital. Not everyone will want to do it, not everyone will want to follow this path, but there will be some who are just crying out to have that level of engagement. If we close these doors and we take the money away from this kind of, if you like, slightly softer form of education, and just concentrate it on the hard stuff, we’re disadvantaging at least a quarter of our children, but an awful lot of adults who simply can’t join in the way an awful lot of people who sit in this Chamber have gone through education.