At last month’s full council meeting, we had the opportunity to scrutinise the annual report of the Council’s Strategic Director for Education. It’s a deep dive into the data that schools collect and gives us an opportunity for a close examination of the challenges facing the county’s school system as a whole. There were two key aspects of the report that particularly caught my eye – funding and attendance.

The biggest challenge of course, being funding. The current administration inherited a school estate in significant surplus, with combined school balances standing at £4million. In nearly four years, this picture has transformed to a combined deficit of £4million and projected to rise further to nearly £7million by the end of the next financial year. These figures are actually net figures so some of the school deficits are offset by small surpluses in some other schools, so the picture is actually worse than these figures suggest. When school budgets are cut, schools often have little choice but to cut staffing and one to one support for vulnerable pupils is all too often the only viable option for schools to cut. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any sense that budgets settlements for schools will be improving in the short to medium term.

On school attendance, our schools are struggling to return to pre-pandemic levels. Across Wales, the percentage of pupils missing school is nearly double the level it was before the Covid-19 pandemic. During that pandemic, the Welsh Government sent a message to parents that school wasn’t important and kept schools closed for longer than in England, for the sake of doing things differently. It’s no surprise that we’re now paying the price for these political decisions. I’m especially concerned about attendance for secondary school pupils who are eligible for free school meals, whose attendance is just 75.8%, 4.4% below the Welsh average. The poorest pupils in Monmouthshire are missing a quarter of their education. They will not be able to perform well in examinations at that level of absence and their projected career earnings will inevitably suffer.

The report highlighted many other important areas including the position of the school estate, standards of attainment and concerns around behaviour in schools, which has considerably worsened since the pandemic. In these areas above and particularly in terms of funding and policy interventions on school attendance, we look to Welsh Government, particularly, for a better settlement in its draft budget later this year.