Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:46 pm on 22 March 2022.
The Member has made some very, very important points in her question there, and I'm glad to hear of the school of which she's a governor focusing so clearly on the importance of pupils being in school as the best environment in terms of their well-being, but, obviously, certainly the best environment in terms of their learning.
We've been doing a significant piece of work in relation to absence, not solely to look at the data, which is, obviously, publicly available, but to drill down beneath that into the experiences of school, as to why pupils are perhaps persistently absent and the kind of more qualitative information that is essential for us to understand if we are to put in place the right responses as a Government to support schools in making sure that pupils come back to school.
And some of that is around confidence in the sense of well-being in pupils, some of it is around—. You know, the last two years has been an experience where some families will have identified not being at school as part of the normal experience of a pupil. Well, that must not be allowed to take hold in the longer term, obviously. But that is not a short-term—. That is not a short-term challenge; I think we are going to need to be working on this consistently.
The point that she made around how we assess how schools are performing—actually, part of what I was referring to in my statement is broadening how we look at this in terms of a school's performance, if you like, and moving away from looking simply at exam results and looking at questions to do with attendance and exclusion and health and well-being in a much more holistic way, which I think captures the kind of priorities that Jenny Rathbone was spelling out in her question.