4. What assessment has the Minister made of the impact of automation on education in Wales? OAQ54171

Our national mission provides all learners with high-level digital skills to ensure that young people are digitally competent and evolve into enterprising, creative and critical thinkers. The digital competence framework, which is the first part of our new curriculum reform, offers learners a set of skills to enable the confident, creative and critical use both of technologies and of systems design. 

Thank you, Minister. According to research by Oxford Economics, by 2030, robots will replace the majority of jobs in manufacturing. However, the analysis suggests that automation can boost jobs and increase economic growth if we adapt the workforce beforehand. Minister, what plans does your Government have to adapt the curriculum to ensure Wales is ready for the fourth industrial revolution?

If I could give the Member just one very concrete example, she will be aware, in the consultation on the curriculum White Paper, that it is my intention, in the new curriculum, to have three statutory cross-cutting responsibilities, building on the two we already have. At the moment, we expect all lessons to contribute to literacy and to numeracy, and, in the future, digital competence will become the third cross-cutting responsibility. 

Minister, obviously, automation is an opportunity for us. Figures do show that up to 35 per cent of the workforce will have to retrain, remodel, their skills and, indeed, many of those jobs might disappear altogether. So, the demands placed on the further education sector in particular and part-time learners are going to be considerable in the next decade or so. What efforts has the department undertaken to model the work so that they can work with the training sector, especially the FE sector, to build that capacity so that where people, particularly in work, need new training opportunities, that capacity is there, so it's not just in the school environment but is right the way through the learning culture that we want to ingrain in our society?

Andrew, you're absolutely right: we will need to ensure that our education providers at a variety of levels will be able to upskill our workforce. Many of those currently in work will be seeking opportunities to retrain or to gain for the first time skills that they will need to keep pace with the local economy. I'm sure that you will have seen the recently published 'Digital 2030' report. That's a new strategic framework for digital learning in the post-16 sector in Wales, which has been developed in collaboration with the FE sector. The framework highlights the importance of ensuring that learners are equipped with digital skills and experiences of using digital technology. 

In terms of the opportunity, then, to access those training opportunities, you will be aware, via a change to the funding methodology to our FE colleges, many of our FE colleges are beginning to get more into part-time provision for older learners. We've seen a significant increase in the number of part-time students applying to study via the Open University and, in September of this year, the Government will launch an individual learning account pilot in north Wales and part of south Wales, which will empower individual learners who are currently in work but in low-paid jobs with the opportunity to use that individual learning account to get back into education, either to allow them to progress up the career ladder or, indeed, to switch careers completely.