Part of 4. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 4:00 pm on 30 June 2021.
I thank Laura Anne Jones for that further question. I don't recognise the picture of confusion that she describes. In our discussions with our partners in the education sector direct, we've been very clear that we will want to have discussions with them in relation to developments as they occur in schools, and we will always want to have those discussions in advance. As I said in my earlier answer, we are having those discussions during the course of this term, and as to the timing, which is the point she closed with, as I said, we'll be publishing the framework based on the discussions with our partners before the start of the new school year. Schools will have the notice that they need in order to be able to bring in these arrangements in the most effective way. There's going to be planning that is needed in order to do that, and they will have the time to do that.
I'm glad to hear her talk about well-being in her question. We are all, all parts of the school system, committed to the well-being and progression of our learners, and some of the interventions that have been necessarily in place. She mentioned school face coverings in her question, and we know that that impacts on well-being and the educational experience of young people in school, and so we want to make sure that those are, obviously, minimised, consistent with the level of risk. The reality is that schools serve different communities in different parts of Wales, and there will be different levels of transmission of the virus in different communities. So, when we say that those steps need to be minimised consistent with the risk, that risk also varies in different parts of Wales, and so what I announced on Monday was a different kind of approach, which will enable a suite of measures to be used in schools that reflects that local risk. But as I also said on Monday, this isn't a sort of—if I can describe it as this—free-for-all; that is not what is intended. There will be a national framework that will apply in local circumstances, and that framework will be discussed with our partners over the rest of this summer term, and schools will have access to the professional public health advice from Public Health Wales, from their local incident management teams, and so on. So, there'll be a very clear set of roles and responsibilities clearly communicated, and schools will have both that support and guidance and the flexibility to have the measures that reflect their local risk profile.