6. What is the Welsh Government doing to improve education standards in South Wales Central throughout the COVID-19 pandemic? OQ56087

Welsh Government has awarded local authorities in South Wales Central over £7.5 million grant funding to recruit, recover and raise standards. This will help schools in the local authority area to provide additional support to those children who are most disadvantaged, most vulnerable, and those that should be sitting external qualifications.

Thanks for that response. We have covered quite a few issues today related to remote learning. I know there is support for parents who are carrying out home teaching on the Hwb, which you mentioned earlier, which is good, and I also appreciate there is an issue of how much guidance the Welsh Government should provide. It is a bit of a balancing act, as you suggested in an earlier answer. David Melding just cited the good practice of Headlands School, and I think that's interesting, because I'm wondering, in the longer term, once we've emerged from the COVID crisis, if you see any positives arising from the experience of remote learning that we have gone through.

It is difficult to find silver linings at this most challenging of times, but there are indeed things that we need to learn. For some children who find the school environment challenging, additional new approaches to delivering education are being developed at this time and could be used to assist those individuals. I spoke to one young man in a school in north Wales who had been receiving his distance learning in the firebreak, and he said that he much preferred it to being in school, if for no other reason than he didn't have to suffer the hour-long journey that he has to suffer in the morning to travel to his place of education. I don’t wish to be flippant, but there are lessons that we can learn, and there is good practice that we can share.

David Melding just talked about the example of Headlands. I’m grateful to Ceredigion council, who have offered up the opportunity to support schools in other areas, because they have the experience of the E-sgol that has run for a number of years now, which delivers entire A-levels via a remote learning method to great success. I know that they are very keen to be able to spread their expertise that they have been able to acquire over recent years to be able to develop and support distance learning in other parts of Wales, for which I am grateful. It shows the collective effort that exists in the Welsh education system to do right by Wales’s children at this very challenging time.

And finally, question 7, Mandy Jones.