Raising educational standards

Education will be at the very heart of a Plaid Cymru government’s ambition for Wales – the key to unlocking new and better opportunities, and building the more confident, innovative and productive nation we know Wales can be.

Ensuring that all our young people are leaving school with the highest possible levels of literacy and numeracy is fundamental if we want to provide them with the best foundation for their futures.

Plaid Cymru will deliver a bold, practical, and inclusive strategy to raise the bar on core educational standards in our schools.

We will ensure that the Curriculum for Wales delivers real depth of subject-specific knowledge. And we will implement a new Foundational Literacy and Numeracy Plan to establish national benchmarks, provide targeted support, ensure high-quality and evidence-led teaching, and with transparent progress tracking for every student.

We will ensure that, by 2030, every primary school in Wales has a dedicated library space, and that reading is embedded into every subject area – not just Welsh and English.

Actions in the first 100 days:

Raising standards

  • Progress the development of a new Foundational Literacy and Numeracy Plan and agree a timeline for implementation
  • Plan for the rollout of the new Libraries in Primary Schools programme
  • Increase Initial Teacher Education (ITE) incentives in shortage subjects by £5,000 for the forthcoming academic year
  • Implement recommendations from the Strategic Workload Co-ordination Group to begin to reduce the bureaucratic burden on teachers

A wrap-around approach on behaviour, attendance and well-being

  • Work with teachers, local authorities and health and social care services to develop a framework to address the overlapping issues of poor attendance and behaviour, and to improve conditions and outcomes related to mental health and student wellbeing
  • Begin the work to pilot a new wrap-around ‘Community Schools Plus’ programme, exploring how different funding streams can be consolidated to better embed specialist and trauma-informed support to address mental health, well-being and behavioural challenges in our schools

A schools estate that’s fit for purpose

  • Commission a national school building conditions survey to get a clearer picture of the state of the school estate in Wales and identify the most urgent repairs and upgrades

Smartphones in schools

  • Bring forward plans to empower local authorities to promote students’ safety, learning and well-being through restricting the use of smartphones in schools for under-16s

A sustainable higher education sector

  • Commission a cross-party and comprehensive review of how universities in Wales are funded, with clear terms of reference that includes ensuring that more of the value of Welsh Government investment in Higher Education stays in Wales, and that more Welsh students are supported to study in Wales
  • Examine options for reforming the Seren programme, so that instead of sending students over the border, it focusses instead on addressing the participation gap, and supporting students from disadvantaged backgrounds to pursue higher education