1. How is the Minister working with local authorities to ensure enough school places are available for pupils across Bridgend? OQ58521

Local authorities are responsible for planning school places. They must ensure that there are sufficient schools providing primary and secondary education for pupils in their areas. I am not aware of any local authority that does not have enough school places.

Thank you, Minister, and I appreciate your response to this question. I know from many parents in my constituency and, of course, across Wales, that they want to be able to send their children to good schools, close to their homes. But this has been a slight issue for parents and pupils in my community, so it is really great to hear about the £1.8 million investment from Bridgend County Borough Council schools in housing developments to increase classrooms and pupil capacity, at Bryntirion Comprehensive School, and that there are plans in place to extend the number of places at Coety Primary School, which is situated in a recent housing development. But I just want to highlight, specifically with Coety Primary School, unfortunately when the housing development was developed, and the school is in the centre of it, there just weren't enough places for the pupils, especially as the housing development now has expanded. So, there has been a gap where there were not enough places in that school for the children living directly around it, and that gap has meant that children have had to go further away and also siblings, in some cases, haven't been able to attend the same school. I understand that it can be tricky to predict how many places will be needed in new schools, but what more can be done, really, to allow a bit more flexibility around this when we have new housing and school developments?

Thank you to Sarah Murphy for welcoming the investment, including that which the Welsh Government provides into schools in Bridgend, as elsewhere. It was good to visit Bryntirion Comprehensive School with her recently. She is right to say, of course, that it is important that we make sure that schools and other public services are aligned with developments in housing. Our planning system is key in this in helping us to ensure that, as new housing developments come forward, there is sufficient school capacity available within communities. Authorities should take a strategic and long-term approach towards provision of community facilities, which obviously includes schools, when they are preparing their development plans. Those plans set out how places will change over a 15-year period—how many new houses will be built and where they will be located. And so, as part of that, we would expect for infrastructure, including school provision, to be a crucial consideration when planning those new housing developments. But I recognise that, sometimes, there is a gap between provision and the need arising, perhaps inevitably.

Minister, in 2011, the Welsh Government published a circular called 'Measuring the capacity of schools in Wales', to support local authorities to plan school places, to report on surplus capacity and to set school admission numbers. Now, using data, as my colleague Sarah Murphy has rightly said—we use data to plan our school places—is vital, like birth rates, the number of new-build homes, migration data and new families moving to new areas. So, what is the Minister now doing to ensure that any supporting guidance is fit for purpose to support local authorities in planning school places now and for the future?

I'm content the guidance is sufficient to enable authorities to do that. Bridgend is a local authority that has more primary school places, in both Welsh and English-medium provision, and similarly in secondary provision, than there are pupils on the roll. There will be, as I discussed with Sarah Murphy a moment ago—. We are not, unfortunately, in the position where parents are always able to have the school of their first choice—that's not the system that we run. There's a balancing between that choice and the availability of places locally to that school, but, on a local authority basis, I can assure you that there are sufficient places to meet the demand that arises.