Service Children

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Education – in the Senedd at 2:17 pm on 25 September 2019.

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Photo of Kirsty Williams Kirsty Williams Liberal Democrat 2:17, 25 September 2019

Presiding Officer, I am very alive to the issues faced by children of serving families, which is why we have made this fund available. That fund this year is supporting three projects in the county of Pembrokeshire, and I'm sure the Member would be glad of that. If he's not aware of the individual projects, I'm happy to write to him with details of the schools that are in receipt of that grant.

We continue to look at the needs of our entire cohort of children when deciding educational budgets, and he will be aware of the challenging financial situation that the Welsh Government has found itself in. I'm committed to doing what I can to find resources to support the projects that are ongoing at the moment, and crucially I have started the process by which we will systematically begin to collect data on armed service families' children in our education system. That is not collected at the moment. It's very difficult to keep track and provide the evidence that we would need to support additional investment in our schools. We have started that process now, where pupil level annual school census data will be amended so that schools can record children of military families, and at the same time we will be amending PLASC data so that families who have adopted children will also be recorded. It's a long and tortuous process—longer than I would have liked it—but that process has now begun, which will mean that we will have better data so that we can make informed policy decisions in the future.