Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:30 pm on 13 November 2018.
Thank you, Jenny. You rightly remind us that we actually need to look at the whole care experience here. It's those people, the children and young people, who are in care—we absolutely need to put the right priorities for them to improve their outcomes—those who are leaving care, but also to focus on, as is the No. 1 work stream now, how we reduce the numbers of children and young people in care. Because we know that if we can make the right early interventions—and that includes with some of our wider support that can identify issues early and apply that multi-agency approach earlier—then we save those costs further down that can be released to put towards children who are in care, and so on. But I'm glad that you are welcoming what we've done with the regional Reflect services and the way we anticipate that there will indeed be a significant uptake on this, because we're starting to see already evidence that it is effective and we expect to see more. It's the right way, I think, again, to work with the people directly to try and help turn around positive outcomes.
Placement stability—absolutely critical. We know that, for those children who are in care, if we get stable placement it leads to positive outcomes, whether that's educationally, on health, on transition to adulthood—the stability of the placement is absolutely key. Some of the recent research that we did—we published research that we brought forward in May this year—it looked at the placement outcomes of children four to five years after a final care order was made. What was heartening from that was that three quarters of that whole cohort of children experienced a high level of placement stability, with either no placement move or only one placement move over the four-year period. Now, that's significant and it shows we're starting to join the dots up a little bit to make sure that they have that stability that gives them the basis then for growing and having the right outcomes as a young individual.
Now, you rightly reflected on the wider aspect of wider mental health and well-being and, again, this goes into the preventative and early intervention agenda. If we can identify and save the costs earlier, it's better for the individual but also better in terms of avoiding the rescue costs further down the line. Of course, the 'Mind over matter' report by the Children, Young People and Education Committee I think was very helpful within this. In September, the Cabinet Secretaries for health and education announced that they would convene a joint ministerial task and finish group—I'm avoiding looking to my right here at the moment, my immediate right—to consider but also to accelerate work to achieve a whole-school approach as part of a whole-system approach to children's mental well-being. The first meeting was on 17 October. We've committed now to move this agenda forward at pace and we'll be providing the CYPE committee with an update on activity and progress against the 'Mind over matter' report in the spring of 2019. And this will, by the way, link, as David will know, with the Improving Outcomes for Children work programme and the ministerial advisory group to ensure that school-based services are able to meet the distinct mental health needs of care-experienced or looked-after children. I think—. I'm looking at Dirprwy—. Sorry, Dirprwy Lywydd, I'd better stop there. [Laughter.]