4. Debate on a Statement: Draft Budget 2020-21

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:44 pm on 7 January 2020.

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Photo of Suzy Davies Suzy Davies Conservative 4:44, 7 January 2020

This has been a fascinating debate. I hope the Minister is listening to this and bearing in mind that it's a debate on a statement and we're all looking forward to hearing some answers to questions in your response to this debate.

And I think the first of those questions I'm going to steal from Helen Mary, which is 'how?' And, unfortunately, Alun Davies has nicked all my thunder here because I want to talk about school funding, because I want to know how you intend to see that any increase in the budget reaches schools in Wales, something which, actually, needs immediate attention this year and can't afford to wait for the results of the Sibieta review. Because in the last decade—and we can argue about the amounts on this—Wales has seen a sustained decade of lower spending per pupil than in England. It's had effects.

We're in this position at the moment where we have a lower number of teachers hoping to train here in Wales. We've had a bigger drop in numbers of teachers than in other parts of the UK, and I see nothing in this budget about how to attract additional teachers. There is money in there; we're talking about CPD and how to get existing teachers ready for the new curriculum, but it doesn't say anything about we're going to increase the number of teachers. It doesn't say anything about how to improve teaching resources. The lack of those was noted in the PISA comments—sorry, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report on PISA. It actually made a point that there's an issue in Wales about teaching resources, and I didn't see anything either, although obviously I could have missed it, about how schools who are not seeking twenty-first century school funding for brand-new schools, how on earth they're going to be able to afford just to carry on the day-to-day maintenance of the schools that they have when that's one of their major sources of complaints. And it goes back to a point that Mike Hedges made earlier about prevention. Oh, you're trying to take—