6. What support does the Welsh Government provide for children with additional learning needs? OQ58327

And I declare an interest in this question as a father of a child with additional learning needs.

Llywydd, I thank Hefin David for the question. When the Senedd returns this autumn, we will have completed the first year of the three-year planned implementation of our Additional Learning Needs and Education Tribunal (Wales) Act 2018. That implementation is supported by £21 million each year to bring about service improvements.

And funding the Act—as a member of the committee that took it through the Senedd last term—is really important. Without that funding, then it can't deliver on what it intends to. But my question is about the Together for Children and Young People partnership, which is now coming to a close and hopes to leave a legacy. And one of the things I said in my short debate is that, in order to address issues with additional learning needs effectively, we need to have children's needs addressed more than we have to address their behaviours. In fact, the children and young people partnership told me that they recommend moving away from condition-specific approaches to one that takes strength-based children's need approaches as more important. And I think, in order to that, the whole provision of health and social care needs to be geared to it. The Deputy Minister, Julie Morgan, has agreed to meet with me to discuss these issues, and I'm very, very grateful for that, and I really appreciate her listening to me. But with that in mind, can the First Minister give us that reassurance that health and social care will be geared to addressing need over behaviour in future?

Well, I think those are really important points, Llywydd. I want strongly to agree with what Hefin David just said about a strengths-based approach in this area. For too long, services make, as their first question, 'What is wrong with you?' Whereas I want the first questions to be asked to be, 'What strengths do you have? What assets do you possess? How can we work with you, from those strengths, to help address the problems that you are currently facing?' People who use our services are not problems to be solved, Llywydd, they are people with strengths and assets in their own lives, and the job of a service is to work with them to mobilise those strengths so that, together, we can create that difference.

Tomorrow the Deputy Minister for Social Services, Llywydd—Julie Morgan—will publish a summary report of the findings of the independent demand and capacity review of neurodevelopmental conditions services, and I believe that review will look to build on the strengths that are there in the current system, but will also allow us to identify gaps and propose a set of immediate actions. I think that those actions will draw on the success of the integrated autism service in the way that the service works across health and social care boundaries in the way that Hefin David suggested. And that will need to have a recognition of the breadth of neurodiversity in the population, acknowledging that every person is unique and that we need a proportionate emphasis on diagnosis that needs to be matched with a focus on responding to need. That's the point I think the Member was making, that if you're not careful, clinicians get drawn into a pattern of responding in which it is all about the diagnosis, it's all about the analysis of what is happening and not enough about what you can do to help people who are facing those circumstances. I think that's recognised now quite widely in neurodevelopmental services, and the demand and capacity review will help us to move those services more towards the provision of help, rather than the analysis of the problem.