On permanent exclusions, the picture is reversed in 2019-20: 7 pupils per 10,000 permanently excluded in Cardiff versus 5 per 10,000 across Wales, though the numbers were the same in the previous year across the country, 5 per 10,000. But, behind these small numbers there are other strategies that some schools use to get rid of pupils they no longer want to be responsible for. Managed moves is one strategy. Looking the other way when challenging pupils fail to turn up is another. Deregistering a pupil because of persistent absence from school is an additional one. Unless there is clarity on why they are not attending and where they have moved to, schools are not discharging their duty of care to individual young people. If there are causes for concern at home, schools are most definitely in the best position to notice and to do something about it.

Even if the real rates of exclusion are twice what the published figures are, the numbers are still small, but their impact on society at large is enormous. One headteacher told me that exclusion is a lifetime sentence to mental illness and/or incarceration. Without qualifications, a young person's chances of getting and holding down a decent job are also very, very unlikely. As an aside, our prisons are full of people who are mentally ill and have lots of adverse childhood experiences. Those views of that headteacher are borne out by the research. Professor Ann John and others at Swansea University have analysed the anonymised education and health records of 400,000 pupils, which firmly link exclusion or persistent absence to current or future poor mental health.

They've yet to prove that school exclusion causes suicide rather than suicidal tendencies being expressed in the behavioural problems that lead to exclusion, but the link to mental illness, suicide and involvement with the police is clear and backed up by various academic studies. It is self-evident that the people who need guidance in school the most are not going to thrive if left unsupervised on the streets, where they are at the mercy of drug dealers—certainly in my constituency.

The Children, Young People and Education Committee's live inquiry into school absences throws up a lot of information that is also relevant to exclusions, as it is to the increased numbers of young people absent from school. Free school meals, ethnicity, additional learning needs, and particularly the significant rise in those identifying as neurodivergent, are characteristics that make a pupil more likely to be persistently absent. Even if they are present, are they making progress in their learning? If not, what strategies are schools using to address that? That's not something that we capture at the moment; we tick off their presence but not what is happening when they are in school. 

The education Minister's evidence to the Children, Young People and Education Committee's inquiry echoes that of the framework for the whole-school approach to emotional and mental well-being, which was issued by Kirsty Williams and Eluned Morgan in the fifth Parliament, which is the importance of a multidisciplinary approach. You cannot expect teachers who are also teaching a class of 30 to also be dealing with the complexity of the individual needs of a child who may need some very highly supported one-to-one support. So, I absolutely agree that the school alone cannot meet all the needs of what is a complex population of young people whose needs will vary as they progress through infancy to adolescence and early adulthood.

It's not about medicalising well-being; it is about taking account of the continuum of need. Primarily, it is about building resilience and ensuring preventative action. But, we really do need to know why there has been this significant rise in the incidence of people with neurodivergence, and I would suggest that the mobile phone may be one of the causes, in the sense that I constantly observe parents on the bus with a small child who will be talking on the phone to somebody rather than talking to their child, and if nobody is talking to a child, they won't learn how to speak, because this is not something we just do organically, it's something that we all learn. That concern is emphasised by the experience of speech and language therapists who go into school when there are particular communication needs.

So, I would like to see a focus on the needs of people who are in danger of being excluded from school. That needs to run parallel to the strategies for addressing the rise in school absences post lockdown, which is what the Children, Young People, and Education Committee is investigating. 

I absolutely acknowledge that there are no easy or quick solutions to reduce exclusion—indeed, eliminating exclusion in all but the most extreme cases of violence to other pupils or staff. The cost to society of excluding children from their right to an education because they don't fit into the provision designed for the majority is significant, and the link to either graduating to involvement with the law, probation and, ultimately, prison system is expensive for society and tragic for the individual. Where that doesn't occur, even more tragic for the individual is their poor mental health, the most extreme example of which is obviously taking their own life. 

Now, the inverse care law was well established by the work of Julian Tudor Hart. So, how do you combat the inverse well-being burden on schools with very different intakes? Some schools are much more comprehensive than others. That's certainly true in Cardiff, where the range of free school meals in secondary schools is between 7 per cent and 55 per cent. So, for the community school approach that the Minister is advocating in the school absence inquiry to be the most successful, all schools, in my view, need to adopt it. We can't just have some schools dealing with this issue rather than others. 

So, my questions to the Minister are: how do you ensure that all local education authorities, consortia and schools within them are emulating the practices of the best on this subject? And given the link to deprivation, how do you ensure that the oversubscribed schools with the least challenges are not simply dumping the problem on less popular and much more challenged schools? Is the funding formula sufficiently nuanced so that resource distribution is equitable? And lastly, when do you expect to release the new guidance on exclusions, which were mentioned by Rocio Cifuentes in the Children, Young People, and Education Committee's inquiry? I also heard you say earlier that you were going to make a statement next week on matters related, so I look forward to hearing what you have to say on this really important subject.