Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:31 pm on 28 March 2023.
Well, the Member made an important point about what are the biggest challenges, and I think possibly the biggest challenge that schools face is making sure that young people are in school. There are obviously very high levels of absence, which many, many schools are reporting. And the Member asked an important question about what the investment into community-focused schools and the family engagement officers that I announced recently will do in relation to that. I should say, as I mentioned in my statement, on the question of absence and engagement more broadly, we are reviewing the guidance available to schools on some of the strategies that schools may adopt. And one of the key issues relates to the threshold for additional intervention—the 'persistent absence' definition. I think there's a very strong case for reviewing that to make sure that more support is more quickly available to families than is often currently the case. And the funding for family engagement officers and education welfare officers as well helps to provide additional capacity in the system.
She asked me whether I'm persuaded that that money is well spent, effectively. I don't think there'll be a Member in the Chamber who will not have visited a school with a family engagement capacity who doesn't immediately see the benefits of that. It's often a 24/7 job, actually, and often involves work on the weekends and certainly in the evenings, as well as the necessary work during the school day of connecting with the family and visiting the family, and so on. It's a very important role, I think, in schools that have a need for it. And I hope that the funding that we have made available will be able to contribute further to that.
On the question about the funding and how that relates to absence and attendance, I can probably do no better than refer her to a report today on WalesOnline, which describes the £46 million that we've invested as part of an attendance strategy, and it records a discussion that I had yesterday at a school in Cardiff, which is doing extraordinary work in terms of partnership with other organisations, including the local council but also the university and sports teams and so on. What they were telling me at the school yesterday was that it helps the young people relate to school differently. So, many of the young people—who were interviewed for this piece, by the way, as well—were telling the journalist that they felt 100 per cent more committed to school by virtue of also being able to do these additional activities as part of being a community-focused school.
We were also hearing about parents coming in to help volunteer to support some of those activities who themselves were benefiting in terms of developing their skills. But, perhaps—I felt at least—more importantly, it was reshaping the relationship of parents to school and rebuilding that relationship of trust, which is really an important part of the challenge for getting young people back into school. So, I encourage her to look at that, because I think it's just a very live example of the sort of thing that we are hoping to achieve here.
There's more detail available in the guidance that we published. There are two iterations of guidance, which we published at the end of last year, which really spell out what the community-focused schools programme is all about, how it can help with attendance and attainment. What I would say, though, is that the key thing is it will be different for each school, and the whole point is: what is the relationship between this particular school and this particular community? And that will be very different in different places, obviously.