Part of the debate – Senedd Cymru am 4:48 pm ar 28 Mawrth 2023.
The Member makes a series of very important points. She talked about the importance of children's own experience of schools, and I think that listening and the hearing of the voices of young people in this is very, very important. The £40 million capital that I announced recently is intended to enable schools to make the kinds of adaptations that schools sometimes do—to fence off areas, to make areas more easily accessible, to reconfigure land and so on—so that the range of facilities in all of our schools, not simply those that have been funded through the sustainable communities for learning programme, are available to the community. That looks different in different schools. I saw a very good example yesterday of how different parts of the school were being used in different ways to support the local community. The reason it's so important is because it helps young people have a different relationship with school, and for those who feel a bit disengaged, it's also an opportunity, as well as being in the class, to be doing the taekwondo or the rugby or whatever it is, the dance, the range of things that through their local clubs they can then enjoy in school. That just changes and cements that relationship with school, which is really fundamental to the point that she started on, the challenge of ensuring attendance.