Since the Covid pandemic, persistent absences in Welsh schools have risen, incidents of poor behaviour have increased, and students’ mental health has worsened. The volume of harmful online content has increased, as has children and young people’s access to it. Teachers report spending less time teaching and more time managing these challenges, and they are all impacting on students’ well-being and learning.
We will:
- Develop a framework that brings together schools, health and social care and youth services to tackle these overlapping issues more effectively.
- Ensure that best practice in addressing poor behaviour and absenteeism is shared more consistently between schools, both locally and nationally, and that incidents are dealt with, recorded and reported in a consistent way.
- Expand professional learning opportunities focused on behaviour management, and develop new guidelines on online safety.
- Make sure that when a pupil moves to a new school after an exclusion or managed move, the receiving school gets the important information they need about that pupil’s behaviour, while respecting privacy and data protection rules.
We will pilot a new wrap-around ‘Community Schools Plus’ programme, exploring how different funding streams can be consolidated to integrate youth services and embed specialist and trauma-informed support within schools to better address the root causes of absenteeism, behavioural challenges and educational inequality.
We will empower local authorities to promote students’ safety, learning and well-being through restricting the use of smartphones in schools for under-16s, working with councils and school leaders to implement this in a practical and proportionate way, with appropriate exemptions where necessary.