We now move on to the short debate. So, if those leaving the Chamber can do so quietly.

If Members can leave the Chamber quietly. We're still in session. I asked for some quiet as you leave the Chamber, please. We're still in session. I'm going to be calling Jenny Rathbone to introduce her short debate. Jenny Rathbone.

Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. I've agreed to give a minute of my time to Heledd Fychan. I represent a very diverse constituency, with both some of the poorest and some of the richest households in Wales. I've long been intrigued by the way different schools in Cardiff and elsewhere deal with pupils' behavioural difficulties and the efforts, or not, they've put into avoiding excluding pupils.

About 10 years ago, Julie Morgan and I visited the pupil referral unit in Gabalfa, and I vividly recall listening to one girl describe the hot meals with pudding she had enjoyed in primary school. It was clear to me that she had not had a hot meal in the three years since, either in school or at home, and I often wonder what happened to her and how her life might have been different if she'd had better support to thrive in school.

We have long judged schools on the proportion of pupils who achieve five A to Cs at GCSE and higher qualifications that get them into the university or training place of their choice. Attainment is very important. Society needs the next generation to have the ability to save our lives if we get run over on our roads, or to re-engineer our homes, our transport and our food system in response to our climate obligations, or, indeed, to make the wealth we need to meet the needs of future generations. But merely focusing on attainment is a blunt tool for measuring how well schools are educating all their pupils.

Children are not born equal, and some children arrive in reception with several adverse childhood experiences already under their belt, and few words to communicate their feelings, whilst others will already have learnt to write their name and express themselves clearly. The new curriculum provides us with the opportunity—indeed, the requirement—to look at the wider aspects of education, particularly the well-being aspects of children's right to an education. This is particularly pertinent to the Welsh Government's ambition to reduce the poverty attainment gap.

The numbers involved are not that significant. Statistically, Cardiff does better on fixed-term exclusions, with 17 per 1,000 pupils, versus 29 per 1,000 for Wales as a whole. These are figures for the last available period, which is 2019-20, and any subsequent figures are not going to be that useful at the moment, because, obviously, the lockdown will have hugely skewed them in one direction or another.

Joyce Watson took the Chair.

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.

May I thank Jenny Rathbone for tabling this very important discussion? Obviously, it is hugely concerning. As someone who was previously a councillor in Rhondda Cynon Taf, I was particularly concerned by the high levels of school exclusions, and particularly among young boys. It seemed to be a problem that wasn't being addressed. I know now, from casework coming in to my office, in terms of school exclusions linked to child and adolescent mental health services not being available, and 30-month waiting times, and these young people are desperate for help, their families are desperate to find them the support that's required, and yet the only route possible is then to exclude them from the one place where they should be safe and where they should be supported. It's also the ad hoc support at present. Some schools are able to afford in-house councillors, therefore bypassing things like CAMHS and providing that immediate support. I'm also concerned with some of the three-to-16 and three-to-19 schools, and what I'm told by parents and teachers and pupils about how difficult it is when you have perhaps pupils that require greater support, but the school just cannot provide that. There are also exclusions because teachers are concerned about the impact of, perhaps, behaviour that may be considered threatening on younger pupils, those who are in the three-to-11 age, and thinking about the general impact. 

So, this is something we must get to grips with. It's a situation that's worsening, and it's particularly problematic in some of our disadvantaged areas where there's child poverty and there are so many different concerns. I also know that parents are fighting for support, but not all parents and carers are able to fight for that support, and therefore we're in this circle of people being failed generation after generation.

School exclusions—I completely agree with you—they should be a last resort. We should be keeping children and young people in school, and I hope we can do more to secure that in the future. 

I call on the Minister for Education and Welsh Language to reply to the debate. Jeremy Miles. 

Thank you, acting Llywydd. May I thank Jenny Rathbone for putting forward this short debate? Every child and young person has the right to receive an education that inspires them and prepares them to fulfil their potential in a safe and supportive environment. I want to be clear that the decision to exclude a learner should only be taken when everything else has failed, that is, that the school accepts that all the strategies available to them to support that young person have failed. 

To decrease the number of exclusions, it's vital to understand why children are having difficulties at school that could cause behaviour that leads to their exclusion. We are already supporting schools in this regard through our work to tackle adverse childhood experiences and through the implementation of the additional learning needs legislation and by providing the right support and provision. And we've funded this to the tune of £67 million to date, and in addition we commit to invest £21 million a year until 2025.

The Welsh Government expects schools to work jointly with local authorities to find another school or setting if a pupil continues to have difficulties in the original school despite all efforts to support them. Our guidance on exclusion notes clearly that the Welsh Government isn't of the view that it is appropriate for schools to commission external provision to deal with issues related to behaviour, for example, home tutoring for those who refuse to attend school. When decisions have been made to exclude a pupil, priority must be given to ensuring the best outcome for that young person that means that they can enjoy their right to receive an education. 

Although it's true to say that not all cases of misbehaviour are the sign of an unmet need, we have to be willing to accept what the behaviour of the pupil does convey to us. So, schools have to investigate the fundamental factors that could contribute to poor behaviour, such as learning disabilities and mental health issues, such as trauma. These need to be tackled to ensure that these issues do not deteriorate to such an extent that exclusion is the only answer.  

In November 2021, Administrative Data Research Wales published its examination of the association of school absence and exclusion with recorded neurodevelopmental and mental conditions in a large cohort of children and young people in Wales. It found that school absenteeism and exclusion rates were higher after the age of 11 in all children, but disproportionately more so in those with a recorded condition. The study also found individuals with more than one recorded condition were more likely to be absent or excluded, and this was exacerbated with each additional condition. To improve the evidence base about the mental health of pupils who have been excluded, we have asked ADR Wales to rerun the research project to link education and health data to identify whether pupils who are excluded, with a focus on those who are in education other than at school, have poorer mental health than those in mainstream provision. ADR are currently developing this proposal.

As part of our whole-school approach to emotional and mental well-being, jointly sponsored by me and the Deputy Minister for Mental Health and Well-being, we're looking at how schools work with other agencies, such as CAMHS, to meet the needs of young people and enable them to stay engaged in their education. And our aim is to ensure schools across Wales are able to develop consistent plans to meet the emotional and mental health needs of their students. 

Our whole-school approach framework statutory guidance published last year highlights that key to achieving effective teaching and learning is ensuring that teachers have the necessary skills to approach their teaching in ways that reduce the likelihood of poor behaviour, whilst also equipping them with effective skills and responses for those instances where difficult behaviour does occur. Where teachers have good preventative and responsive skills, the likelihood of difficulties emerging or developing into incidents and escalating to exclusion will be markedly reduced. 

There are already many instances of good practice—and Jenny Rathbone alluded to this in her opening remarks—good practice on which we can draw, and I want to make sure that, through our new guidance, which I'll say more about in a moment, we are able to make sure that schools do draw on that good practice. And we know that many schools undertake well-being audits, which give pupils an opportunity to share how they feel about themselves, their relationships, their progress in school. This is used by staff alongside other information, such as attendance and behaviour information, to identify those who may benefit from additional support. 

Schools have also used our whole-school approach funding to train emotional literacy support assistants to support pupils to reflect and share honestly their thoughts and feelings, with the aim of understanding the psychological need behind poor self-esteem and undesirable behaviour, enabling them to relate better to their peers, to improve their decision making in social contexts, and to be better at identifying risky situations. Recognising the importance of this work, the Deputy Minister and I have agreed funding of £12.2 million in the current year to support emotional and mental well-being in schools, part of an over £43 million investment over the course of the three-year budget.

In reflecting on the impact of the pandemic on learning, and in considering the wider policy contexts, such as ALN reforms, it's clear that updating our exclusions guidance must be a priority. This will ensure that it's able to draw on all the good work, activity and learning that has taken place since the guidance was last updated in 2019, and I hope to have the new guidance available early next year. But I'm keen that this work is not undertaken in isolation, and that all interrelated policies are considered holistically. 

The recent attendance review contained a number of recommendations that we will be taking forward, one of which is a review of the current attendance guidance. This will include sharing and disseminating best practice for improving attendance and considering how best schools can engage with learners and their families and provide targeted professional development. As part of this work, I'm keen that we review the definition of 'persistent absence', which is currently considered as being more than 20 per cent absent. This is an important measure as it's often set as the trigger for certain kinds of intervention, such as the involvement of the education welfare service. 

The report also highlighted the link between deteriorating attendance and subsequent behavioural and emotional problems of the sort that Jenny Rathbone referred to very compellingly in her opening speech. And if they're not addressed, they may lead to exclusion of those learners from school. This reinforces the need for these policies to be considered and reviewed in parallel. The disproportionate number of exclusions of learners with additional educational needs will be another key factor in the development of our new policy in this area. But this must go beyond a simple update of guidance. I think the events of the last two years have undoubtedly had an impact on all learners to varying degrees, and our approach must be centred on a learner-first ethos that considers the different experiences and circumstances of each of our learners, particularly post pandemic. And I am committed to embedding a children's rights approach to policy making, and it is this key principle that will guide our approach. 

And that brings proceedings to a close today. 

The meeting ended at 17:44.