7. Will the Minister make a statement on teaching international citizenship in schools? OAQ54605

Diolch yn fawr, Rhun. Learners currently have opportunities to study international citizenship through education for sustainable development and global citizenship, the Welsh baccalaureate, and personal and social education. Ensuring that learners become ethical, informed citizens, who are ready to be citizens of Wales and the world, is, of course, one of our four purposes in our new curriculum.

Thank you. My supplementary question is slightly different to the one that I had originally intended to ask. I'm pleased to see the Minister for international relations by your side. The original question emerged from a meeting that we had of the cross-party group that I chair, Wales International, where we were discussing the draft international strategy produced by Government. And the question was: in the context of Brexit and that discussion, how can we sell the international strategy to those people who, perhaps, don’t want to work internationally? That question still stands, but what I want to pursue instead—and I changed the emphasis because of what we’ve heard today, that appalling news about 39 people who were found dead in a lorry container that had passed through Holyhead. Some of the comments that I’ve read about the incident are appalling. They characterise the lack of tolerance that has been part of the public discourse over the past few years.

So, how can we ensure that the kind of citizenship education that is presented in Welsh schools does far more to teach people about Wales’s place in the world, its relationship with the rest of the world, and how people interact with each other, so that people don’t feel that it is acceptable to go on social media and make public statements that are quite, quite appalling about events such as the one we’ve heard about today?

Rhun, there are no adequate words to express the horror of the discovery of those individuals in the back of that lorry. It is a truly shocking thing to have happened, and then to have that reinforced by the comments that you have referred to—I have not seen them myself, but I can well imagine what they have said. As I said in answer to your original question, we are moving to a purpose-led curriculum that articulates the kind of citizens, the attributes, the type of people that we want to emerge as a result of their time in the Welsh education system, and I want them to be those ethical and informed citizens of Wales and the world.

Your comments come on top of the question that was raised by your colleague Bethan Sayed around the report today into racism in our universities. We have a problem here in Wales and we have to use all aspects of Welsh Government public policy to be able to address that. There is a huge responsibility on education to ensure that these views are challenged when they're expressed, and we can give children the opportunity to understand and to develop empathy and respect, and the reasons why those 39 people felt desperate enough to climb into the back of the lorry in the first place.