6. How will the new Curriculum for Wales help young people to better identify, and protect themselves from, online harm? OQ58755

Keeping safe online is critical to our children's physical and mental health. That's why digital competence is a mandatory cross-curricular skill and the health and well-being area has a focus on developing safe behaviour online. It's also a clear focus of the relationships and sexuality education code.

Thank you, Minister, for your response. Minister, a Youth Endowment Fund report highlighted some concerning statistics: over the past 12 months alone, some 54 per cent of children and young people in Wales had experienced or had seen some form of online violence on social media. This has had a profound effect on not only the mental health and well-being of these young people, but their education and wider lives too. In Wales, 57 per cent had changed their behaviour and a tenth had missed school because of online violence. These numbers also help to back up many of the observations made by the Children, Young People and Education Committee in their report on pupil absence from school, which said that learners' mental health is a key factor in them missing school. The new curriculum is a welcome step in helping young people to better understand some of these issues, and the health and well-being area of learning and experience has the potential to be an important vehicle to introduce such issues in education settings. Minister, how is the Government working with schools to ensure that teachers and other education professionals are equipped with the skills they need to effectively discuss these difficult but important topics with young people? Does the Government have plans to help schools to better engage with parents and guardians so that they too are able to support children to identify and protect themselves from online harm?

I thank Peter Fox for raising this and for the way in which he's raised it. It's a very profound challenge, isn't it, and a challenge that many of us who are—considerably, in my case, at least—beyond school years find it hard to understand the scale of, really. But it is a very significant issue, and as Peter Fox was saying, the evidence given to the CYPE committee is very vivid in the scale of the challenge that young people face.

You mentioned the health and well-being area of learning in the curriculum, and that is fundamental to how we can teach young people to develop safe behaviours in relation to the online world. In many ways, so many aspects of our lives are now entwined with using technology that teaching that digital literacy and resilience is absolutely fundamental.

We have a dedicated single area on Hwb, the learning platform, called 'Keeping safe online', which provides learners but also, in the way that his question was asking about, families, practitioners, professionals and governors with a range of resources. That's where we make sure that all our resources in this area are hosted. Some of them have been developed specifically as a consequence of the work that we've been doing in relation to peer-on-peer sexual harassment in school. There are broader resources there as well, and that is about enhancing digital resilience across the life of the school generally, including obviously online safety but also cyber security and data protection. All of those aspects can have a significant impact, can't they, on the lives of young people.

Also, just to say, keeping children safe obviously is a part of the RSE code, and online safety in that context, dealing with issues around online bullying, for example. All of those are included in the code at a developmentally appropriate phase, handled in a sensitive way, and we will continue to invest in professional learning and support for teachers so that they have the best available resources for teaching young people in this area.