3. Statement by the Minister for Social Justice: Shaping Wales Future — Laying national milestones, revised national indicators and publishing a Future Trends report

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:39 pm on 14 December 2021.

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Photo of Jenny Rathbone Jenny Rathbone Labour 3:39, 14 December 2021

Thank you, Minister, for your statement. Neither of us is likely to be around to be scrutinised by 2050, so—. Even your 2035 target for improving the healthy behaviours of young people is 13 years away. So, I'd like to ask you to expand a little bit on how we're going to get nine out of 10 children adopting two or more healthy behaviours. I appreciate that free school meals for all primary school pupils and extending childcare to two-year-olds are good places to start. But Meilyr Rowlands's report on peer-on-peer sexual harassment, published by Estyn last week, makes very uncomfortable reading, and there's clearly a huge amount of work to be done to tame the harmful aspects of new technology, not least engaging with parents and discouraging them from giving these tools to online pornography to be made available to young people. 

Equally, if we're going to get at least three quarters of working-age adults in Wales qualified to level 3, how is that going to inform the parity we need to attach to technical skills, as opposed to academic skills, particularly in relation to how schools promote the importance of both those skills? And how is this going to inform the measures we use to assess the effectiveness or value added by schools, rather than it being a little bit more random than that, in relation to the numbers of deprived children a particular school may have? So, I think, obviously—