To save you the trouble of all that searching, here’s what the Plaid Cymru election manifesto has to say about education, and about environmental / climate / sustainability / global / etc education – see text in bold.
Education holds the key to Wales’s future, and Plaid Cymru wants to create an education system where both learners and the workforce can thrive.
Fairness for Parents
No child or family should struggle with the cost of education. No child should be hungry at school. It is only because of Plaid Cymru that all primary school children in Wales receive free school meals.. Our campaigning has also helped secure the extension of the Education Maintenance Allowance. We will continue to campaign for universal free schools meals
to be extended to secondary school learners, in years 7 to 11, ensuring all children attending school receive a nutritious meal every day.
Learners are also affected by the cost of the school day, including transport, uniforms and extra-curricular activities. Reducing these costs is essential. No learner should miss a day of school or miss out on opportunities because of their family’s financial position.
Ambition for our Children
School budgets have been stretched to breaking point, and by securing fair funding for Wales, we will ensure schools are resourced to provide both the education and support our learners require in order to leave education equipped for their futures. This includes investing in additional learning needs provision and investing in mental health support.
Crucially, it also means investing in our workforce, ensuring both teachers and support staff are supported and valued in order to improve both recruitment and retention.
We would do this by:
— Reviewing all bursary schemes available to incentivise teachers, to ensure they attract applicants and help to fill recruitment gaps.
—Working with the teaching unions to reduce bureaucracy and workload.
—Recruiting and retaining 5000 teachers and support staff.
—Conducting a review of Initial Teacher Education and Continuing Professional Development to ascertain their relevance to the demands of the new curriculum.
—Appointing more non-teaching staff to deal with pupil needs beyond education.
—Develop a more attractive and formalised role for teaching assistants who currently do not have a clear career pathway
Plaid Cymru also believes that all learners should leave school able to speak both Welsh and English fluently, as well as at least one other language. The decline in the number of learners taking Welsh as an A level, or studying a modern language, is of concern, and doesn’t reflect the fact that Wales in a multi-lingual and diverse nation.
Supporting Staff and Learners
The safety of both learners and staff at our schools is also a priority for Plaid Cymru, and we believe that by investing in both the workforce and the support available for learners, this will create a safer learning environment for all. Bullying, racism and homophobia within our schools–and wider society-must be stamped out.
Reviewing the implementation of the new Curriculum for Wales and the Additional Learning Needs Act is essential, to ensure consistency in terms of the education and support learners receive wherever they are in Wales. This also means providing training and resources to the workforce, to ensure that teachers and teaching assistants are equipped to deliver the changes needed. We will also continue to support capital spending on upgrading and building new schools. There is no reason why private fee-paying schools should receive additional support from taxpayers. We would scrap private school charitable status and charge VAT on fees and remove the exemption from business rates.
Early Years
Plaid Cymru secured extended childcare provision through the Cooperation Agreement, but our ambition goes further.
Our vision is for a national and free Welsh-medium early years education and childcare service, Meithrin Cymru, providing high quality provision for children aged 12 months until they are eligible for full time education.
This requires an investment in the childcare workforce, including offering free Welsh language learning opportunities in the English- medium sector so they can be part of the scheme. Mudiad Meithrin would have a key role to play in making sure that Welsh language childcare is available in all parts of Wales.
Post 16 education
Plaid Cymru will place vocational education on the same foundations as academic learning in school and university.
An independently commissioned review of Vocational Qualifications in Wales was commissioned as part of the Cooperation Agreement. It made 33 recommendations for the new Commission for Tertiary Education and Research and Qualifications Wales. We will ensure that these are taken forward.
Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol
We will continue to support the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol to fund and promote higher and further education through the medium of Welsh and for academics to conduct research in Welsh.
We will increase the funding for the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol to enable it to fully develop its Further Education and Apprenticeship Welsh- medium Action Plan, and also to recruit and train a bilingual workforce, both in teaching and more generally -strengthening the use of the Welsh language in the workplace learning for 16 to 25-year-olds. This requires us to understand the needs and desires of Welsh speaking students before they enter Higher Education in order to contribute to workforce planning and the use of Welsh in the workplace.
Seren Network
Plaid Cymru will review the Seren programme, which aims to support Wales’s brightest sixth-formers, to increase the access for learners from disadvantaged backgrounds to take part in the Seren Network, and to better align it to the opportunities offered by Welsh Higher Education Institutions. We will offer summer schools at each Welsh university for Seren Foundation learners; expand the current partnerships with Aberystwyth and Cardiff universities and set up new pilots in other Welsh institutions.
Higher Education and Research
For years, Plaid Cymru has been raising concerns about the higher education sector, warning that it is in crisis and in need of urgent support. We have done so because we recognise the important role of universities within our communities, in attracting students and staff and supporting the local economy and supply chain through realising our young people’s talents.
Recognising the severe challenges facing the sector, we will work to expand the numbers studying at Welsh universities, attracting greater numbers of Welsh-domiciled students as well as retaining the current number of UK and overseas students will result in a net increase of overall students. We will work with the sector and the Coleg Cenedlaethol to support personalised and flexible pathways into Higher Education through increased recognition of learning achieved elsewhere, and through promotion of short courses. These new pathways will help meet workforce training needs and also offering enriching policies for lifelong learning and community renewal.
In line with developments across Europe, we will prioritise areas that promote economic and social sustainability. We will also increase Government investment in Research and Development. We would seek to devolve Wales’s share of UK Research and Innovation expenditure and for a block grant to be allocated based on population, and overseen rigorously to ensure Wales’s continued role as a producer of leading internationally recognised research with impact on life in Wales and beyond.
Our ambition remains to make University education free again for all, and we will work with Universities to develop a plan to make them financially viable so that this can become a genuine option.
Lifelong learning
To even up educational investment we need to commit to investing in lifelong learning not just paying it lip service. We need to start by creating a Lifetime Learning Allowance, this would consist of a mixture of grants, loans, and a right to free provision.
We would offer a grant of £5,000 to the Personal Learning Accounts of every individual over 25 to train or retrain, with added loans to cover more expensive courses and maintenance costs for those who want to take courses full time (repaid in the same way as student loans). They would be available to anyone regardless of what previous funding they have received. Initially, we will trial this with those who have been made recently redundant.
Tuition and maintenance loans at Levels 4, 5 and 6, including for vocational qualifications, will be made available to all adults aged 18 or over, and available in both further and higher education.
We would address the fall in part-time and mature study over the past decade. This may include more blended learning options and a move away from three-year full-time bachelor’s degrees to a greater mix of part-time, shorter and more vocational courses. Our childcare offer would be available to those for whom caring responsibilities are a critical barrier to learning.
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Plaid Cymru would prioritise work to alleviate the effects of climate change on our communities, and in ways that take account of the psychological as well as physical tolls of this crisis.
The school curriculum should equip young people with an understanding of climate challenges and encourage a philosophy of engaging with climate change and the natural world.