The link between attendance and educational attainment is, of course, clear. Missing sustained periods of school presents a real risk to a child's attainment, and can also lead to them feeling more disengaged from their education. Monitoring educational outcomes and the links with attendance rates are crucial considerations as part of the development of the new data ecosystem. Simply put, the ecosystem will ensure that schools have the information they need to support learning and improve outcomes and to be able to link questions of attendance with questions of outcome.

We know that schools provide so much more than education. For some children, school is a haven, a place where they feel safe, where they feel seen and heard. School provides an opportunity for children to see positive values in action, a place where bonds and friendships are created that can last a lifetime, as well as a place to develop the social skills that we know are so important. Schools can't do this alone, of course. Success is dependent on partnership with parents, carers and the community. We know that greater engagement with families has been shown to have a positive impact on tackling the impact of poverty on attainment and on improving attendance. I was at a school last week talking to the head about how they engage with families around attendance, and he said to me that if you talk to families about 90 per cent attendance, for many that feels like a very high level of achievement, but when you describe the number of days lost that that involves, that paints a very much starker picture.

We want all schools in Wales to be community-focused schools, which means responding to the needs of their community, building strong partnerships with families and carers, and collaborating effectively with other services. Our family engagement officers play a critical role in our community-focused school model. Family engagement ensures that families feel listened to and valued. Their needs, and those of their children, are understood and catered for. They are encouraged to play an active role in their child's learning. Schools should encourage the involvement of all families in the work that they do, but should have a particular focus on supporting families from lower income households. I thank Jenny Rathbone for the visit to the school in her constituency today where we heard some very innovative approaches in relation to just that.

We'll continue to invest in family engagement officers this year by providing funding of over £6.5 million. We are also looking, as has been referred to in the debate, at what we can do nationally to support schools in engaging with parents and carers and around communications to address any concerns they still have, and emphasising the importance of children going to school. Some local authorities have already been running local campaigns, and we will consider what lessons we can learn to share nationally across Wales in the way that Jayne Bryant was asking for me to confirm.

Local authoritiy education welfare services have a vital role to play, not only in driving up attendance, but also in ensuring all children receive the education they deserve and have the right to expect. I'll be investing £2.5 million into these services this year to provide much-needed additional capacity. This will enable the service to provide earlier support before issues escalate, and also provide more intensive support to learners with high levels of absence.

We know there has been an increase in the numbers of families choosing to home educate since the pandemic. For some, this has been an active choice, but I acknowledge this is not likely to have been the case for all. No parent should be deregistering their child due to a lack of appropriate support. Understanding the decisions that lie behind parents choosing to home educate is therefore important. We are working with Data Cymru to improve the quality and level of data we currently capture in relation to deregistration and the key demographics of this cohort, including the reasons for deregistration.

As we've discussed already in the debate today, poor mental health has been linked to poor school attendance, with anxiety often described as a key factor. Our framework on embedding a whole-school approach to emotional and mental well-being highlights the need for schools to use the data sources available to them when considering the well-being needs of their community. We'll be considering how attendance data can be used to help inform how schools support the well-being of learners to prevent persistent absence. Ensuring that every young person has the opportunity to reach their potential is my priority, and working with partners to increase learner attendance is fundamental to this.