3. How is the Minister ensuring that the education system provides young people with essential life skills? OQ58514

The Curriculum for Wales's mandatory four purposes provide the shared vision and aspiration for every child and young person. The purposes, and the integral skills that support them, set high expectations to ensure every learner gains a broad and balanced education, including the skills they need to thrive.

Thank you, Minister. We all know the importance of young people leaving school with a good education. However, having a good education should be more than just receiving good grades. It should be about giving young people the skills that they need to deal with life. Life skills help people focus on many facets of their lives and are essential in helping them manage stress and to solve the problems they may face throughout their lives. The life skills that I'm referring to include developing effective communication, financial literacy, decision making, time organisation, stress management, as well as more basic skills, such as cooking and sewing. So, Minister, how is the education system in Wales providing young people with the essential life skills required to fully prepare them for the future? Because, as much as it's important for someone to know pi equals 22/7 or 3.14, it's also incredibly vital that young people know early on how to pay a bill, fill out a mortgage form, learn how to invest their money, and how to submit tax returns as well.

The Member will be aware, of course, that our new curriculum in schools has the provision of life skills very much at its heart. We want practitioners to have the agency to be able to develop their curricula to support learners to develop exactly those sorts of life skills. The four purposes that are at the heart of the curriculum are underpinned by a range of 33 characteristics, which comprise a range of different life skills, very much inspired by the report of 2019 by the last Welsh Youth Parliament, which I'm sure she's familiar with, 'Life skills, skills for life.' That was one of the key issues that was raised by the Youth Parliament then. That's been a really important part in our thinking about how we take the curriculum forward. So, I welcome her commitment to this area—it's one that we all share—and we look forward to seeing the curriculum rolling out through our schools, providing the range of life skills, some of which she highlighted in her question.

I'd like to thank Natasha Asghar for tabling this important question. Minister, given what young people have been through with COVID, what they're going to go through with the cost-of-living crisis, it is essential, is it not, that, through the new curriculum, they're able to attain those essential life skills, particularly in financial literacy and mental health awareness. Would you join me in recognising the hard work in the previous Senedd by Bethan Sayed, who really did push very hard the need for young people to develop essential financial skills?

Yes, indeed, and I pay tribute to Ken Skates's work as well in relation to the area of mental health awareness in particular. I absolutely agree with the burden of his question. We know that life skills such as financial literacy, alongside decision making and mental health and emotional well-being, are critical elements of a transformative curriculum. Not everybody, of course, voted for that curriculum when they were given that opportunity. He will know that the guidance sets out developing financial literacy for the study of the number system in mathematics, it's complemented in the health and well-being area through exploration of risk and personal debt and its consequences, and the curriculum brings those areas together. So, whichever part of the curriculum the young person is studying, there's an opportunity to bring those aspects together, to align them, to give them the full suite of skills, including those of mental health awareness and financial literacy, which Ken Skates has just emphasised.

Part of the new curriculum and the core skills we're trying to develop in our young people is also that confidence. It's some real hardcore nitty-gritty things, but it's also confident, creative children who are willing to speak out and engage. You can often tell when you walk into a class and they're chatting away—well behaved, but chatting.

We just had Bryncethin primary up in the gallery today. I asked them, Minister, on this question, 'If I was to ask him something related to this, what would I do?', and the hands just shot up and it was just great to see. So, Minister, I'll give you the question, at the risk of flooring you now. The question that they asked was—from primary school children— how do we build more new, exciting schools in Wales?

Fantastic. Well, one of the opportunities that I hope that Bryncethin and other schools will take up is the sustainable schools challenge fund, which I launched recently, which is an opportunity to build schools on a pilot basis using natural materials—so, wood, stone—and to do that designing them with the young people and staff in schools, as a real curriculum opportunity. I think many of us have been to the first net-zero school in Wales, which is South Point primary in the Vale of Glamorgan, and have seen there the QR codes around the building, which explain the story of the building to the young people as a teaching tool: why is it built in this way? How does it operate? What is its environmental impact? I think that's a real opportunity for us in bringing the curriculum together with questions around the school estate. But a fantastic question from Bryncethin primary.