Consultation document: the review of the Minority Ethnic Achievement Grant

The Welsh Government wants to ensure that the Minority Ethnic Achievement Grant (MEAG) reaches all the children who stand in need of the specialist support it provides and results in the best possible learner outcomes for them

Using Geographic Information Systems to investigate variations in accessibility to ‘extended hours’ primary healthcare provision

There are ongoing policy concerns surrounding the difficulty in obtaining timely appointments to primary healthcare services and the potential impact on, for example, attendance at accident and emergency services and potential health outcomes. Using the case study of potential access to primary healthcare services in Wales, Geographic Information System (GIS)‐based tools that permit a consideration of population‐to‐provider ratios over space are used to examine variations in geographical accessibility to general practitioner (GP) surgeries offering appointment times outside of ‘core’ operating hours. Correlation analysis is used to explore the association of accessibility scores with potential demand for such services using UK Population Census data. Unlike the situation in England, there is a tendency for accessibility to those surgeries offering ‘extended’ hours of appointment times to be better for more deprived census areas in Wales. However, accessibility to surgeries offering appointments in the evening was associated with lower levels of working age population classed as ‘economically active’; that is, those who could be targeted beneficiaries of policies geared towards ‘extended’ appointment hours provision. Such models have the potential to identify spatial mismatches of different facets of primary healthcare, such as ‘extended’ hours provision available at GP surgeries, and are worthy of further investigation, especially in relation to policies targeted at particular demographic groups

Challenges to implementing the new homelessness prevention agenda in Wales

Devolution presented an opportunity for the Welsh Government to introduce changes to housing and homelessness policy, and the subsequent homelessness reforms are seen as one of the best examples to date of the Welsh Government using its powers. However, devolved governments in small countries face a number of challenges in terms of realising their housing policy ambitions. In this article we argue that there is inevitable dissonance between the policy behind the Welsh Government legislation (prevention) and practice (implementation) associated with structural challenges (for example austerity and budget restrictions, Welfare Reform and the availability of affordable accommodation). In response we propose a number of actions the Welsh Government might undertake to attempt to mitigate such structural challenges which also resonate in the English context where welfare retrenchment and homelessness prevention policies operate simultaneously

Follow up inquiry into parenting in Wales and the delivery of the Parenting Action Plan: plain English summary and recommendations

"In December 2005, the Welsh Government published its Parenting Strategy and Parenting Action Plan... In May 2009, the Children and Young People Committee... published its report on ‘Parenting in Wales and the Parenting Action Plan.’ The report said that more needed to be done if everything the Welsh Government said it would do in the Parenting Action Plan was to be delivered. The report made 11 recommendations. The Welsh Government said that they would do all of the things the report recommended, either in the way the Committee suggested, or in a way not suggested by the Committee but that would have the same end result. In 2010, the Committee decided to look again at the support the Welsh Government gives to parents in Wales. This is the report of that follow-up inquiry." - Page 8

National literacy and numeracy framework and tests

"The recently published National Literacy Programme and the soon to be published National Numeracy Programme set out the actions the Welsh Government intends to implement to improve literacy and numeracy standards in Wales. The plans for a statutory national framework and for a system of national testing are integral to both programmes" - inside front cove

Perspectives on innovation within medium-sized firms in Wales

The Welsh economy is heading towards a post-Brexit future with historically lower levels of productivity continuing to leave the country lagging behind the UK average (Huggins and Williams, 2011; Welsh Government, 2017). An understanding of how new models of innovation are constructed and developed are then particularly important for policy makers and academia in Wales. As noted by Baughan (2015), innovation accounts for 25-50% of labour productivity growth