I was actually quite shocked just reading in advance of this meeting that the proportion attending 95 per cent or more, who have pretty full attendance, was only 35 per cent for free-school-meal children at level 4, compared to 60 per cent for non-free-school-meal pupils. It still is an extraordinary difference. My colleague here showed me, I think, last week, a graph showing the link between attendance and attainment, in particular. When people were absent, a lot of the—. As I'm sure you're aware, there's a huge connection. What more can PDG do to deal with it? In the example you give I can see how a school with an awful lot of free-school-meal children could do that, but a lot of the free-school-meal children are actually in schools that don't have that high a proportion of free school meals, where it would be much more challenging to bring in that type of initiative.
Yes, indeed, and I think it gets more challenging the older the children get. I think it's more difficult to find interventions that are successful higher up, so key stage 4. So, you can do a walking bus with little ones, can't you, but I don't suppose your average 15 or 16-year-old is going to take very kindly to that. So, you do need a different approach to that. But again, we see in Ysgol y Preseli the employment of staff to directly work with families of older children to reinforce the messages around, as you quite rightly say, the linkage between attendance and attainment, and really work with individual families to understand the barriers to attendance: what's going on in the family that is preventing that child from going to school, and what more can the school do to address those situations. But you're absolutely right; there is more that we need to do to address this particular agenda of attainment. I don't know if there's anything extra you wanted to add, Steve.
There is also another very good example—and I take what you say about where there are small numbers—but in our secondary schools where there are significant numbers, they're investing PDG in resources like a school nurse and a school counsellor, not just to work with the children but link to other agencies on whom the children and the families are dependent to support them in terms of working with schools. So, it's something, particularly in our most challenging areas, where it cannot just be delivered within the school. So, good use of that resource is being made to employ people to support them in those wider areas.
Thank you. To what extent is PDG also used to seek to reduce the higher rates of exclusion for children entitled to free school meals?