1. What support is the Welsh Government providing to improve educational facilities in Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire? OQ56710

Llywydd, through our twenty-first century schools and colleges programme, we have invested £48 million in educational facilities for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire. This will continue, with a further £12 million proposed in a second wave of programme funding.

Thank you, First Minister. I recently visited Cosheston VC School in my constituency, where I met with the headteacher and the chair of the governors. This is a happy school, with pupils eager to learn from enthusiastic and able teachers. However, concerns were raised with me over the lack of space available, which has been worsened due to COVID restrictions. Staff spend non-teaching time working from their cars or in corridors, and pupils have just one toilet to share between a class of 30 in a temporary portakabin. Whilst pledges have been made to provide additional portakabins as a temporary solution, a permanent solution is available, with ample classroom space found in the loft of the school building. Would you agree with me that a permanent solution is preferable, to ensure that Cosheston school and its infrastructure are conducive to providing a suitable and enjoyable learning and working environment? 

Llywydd, I thank the Member for that supplementary question, and, clearly, he raises matters of importance to parents and students in Cosheston. The way in which the twenty-first century schools and colleges programme works, however, is that it is for the local authority to prioritise their bids and then to submit them to the Welsh Government, which has the job of weighing them up across the whole of Wales and then allocating funding accordingly. As I said in my opening answer, Llywydd, Pembrokeshire has already had a significant programme of investment in the first phase of the twenty-first century schools programme, and, in band B, there's another £120 million going to be invested in the school and college estate in the Pembrokeshire county, and I'm sure that the governors and the headteacher of Cosheston school will be making their case, alongside the Member, to the elected members of Pembrokeshire council as they go about the difficult job of prioritisation. 

Diolch. I know Cosheston school well; I went there. But I do have a longer memory than the Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire. As a Pembrokeshire councillor from 1995, I saw the transformational impact of unprecedented investment in our schools by the successive Welsh Governments. And today, despite more than a decade of Tory cuts to Welsh budgets, I think I'm right in saying that the Welsh Government's fantastic twenty-first century schools programme has already funded 170 new schools and colleges in the first phase, and another 43 projects under way in the second. So, I'm assuming that all that is correct, First Minister, and I'm interested to know what your plans are for that programme going forward.

Llywydd, I thank the Member for that supplementary question. She is right to point to the transformational impact of the twenty-first century schools and colleges programme, and nowhere is that more true than in Pembrokeshire: a new Tenby Church in Wales primary school, Ysgol Hafan y Môr, a Welsh-medium primary school, a new secondary school, Ysgol Harri Tudur, £6 million invested in Pembrokeshire College in band A of the programme, and more to follow now in band B. And I think Joyce Watson makes a very important point, Llywydd: this is not just quantity—that very large number of new schools and refurbished buildings that the programme has been able to provide—it's the quality of the environment that the programme focuses on, the fact that every building has a distinctive character of its own, that every one of them provides facilities fit for learning in the twenty-first century, and every one of them sends a powerful message to students who attend for their education of the investment that this nation wants to make in them and their futures. That's the significance of the programme, and Joyce Watson was quite right, Llywydd, to draw attention to it.