Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Education – in the Senedd at 2:18 pm on 5 June 2019.
Well, as I referred to earlier, we are providing unprecedented amounts of financial support to educate children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds via our pupil development grant. We continue to maintain education maintenance allowance for those children from a poorer background, allowing them to be able to stay on in school or in further education, and we have introduced the most generous system of maintenance grant support for those people from a poorer background who want to study at a higher education level. Of course, it should not be the case that a pupil's destiny is dictated by the size of their parents' bank balance, but I have to say to the Member who sits on those benches: the effects of poverty on a child's education are devastating, and the schools I go to say to me that it is getting worse and worse every year, and we are trying to pick up the pieces and mitigate for that in our school system, and the Member should be mindful of that when she asks such questions.