Tackling Poverty Action Plan

for patients with mental health issues related to financial or redundancyissues.The new mental health strategy, Together for Mental Health, aims toeliminate inequalities in access and to ensure those most vulnerableservice users themselves are heard and acknowledged. Outcomemeasures and indicators are currently being developed for the strategy.Narrowing education attainment gapsThe Welsh Government’s overall reforms to raise school standards play a keyrole in reducing the impact of poverty on educational attainment. By raisingthe performance of all schools, and by reducing the variations found betweenand within schools, standards of learning will increase for all learners, andthose from deprived backgrounds will benefit most. This, in turn, will equipyoung people and adults to reach their potential and secure sustainableemployment. Secondary school banding has helped us identify which schoolsneed support, and enabled the consortia to differentiate the support availablefor schools in specific circumstances.All four regional education consortia have action plans in place for allschools in bands four and five. These action plans include a practicalfocus on steps towards improvement, with financial support from theWelsh Government of £10,000 to support individual action plans.Good literacy and numeracy skills are essential to improving standardsin education. The National Literacy Programme for Wales sets out theactions that will be taken by the Welsh Government and our partners toachieve a step-change in standards of literacy over the next five years.Amongst the key initiatives in the Literacy Programme are targetedsupport for pupils; support for teachers’ professional development; thesharing and consistent use of best practice; a statutory NationalLiteracy and Numeracy framework; and development of nationalreading tests. Our National Numeracy Programme will be published inthe Autumn.We also recognise that as children and young people move through theschool system, they will have a variety of needs and preferences. Our14-19 Learning Pathways policy has been developed to ensure that alllearners have access to a wider choice of general and vocationalcourses at both Key Stage 4 and Post-16. It also secures anentitlement to support learners to overcome any barriers to theirlearning or to remaining engaged in learning.In the short term, the Pupil Deprivation Grant is a key opportunity forschools to invest in effective approaches for tackling the impact ofdeprivation. Under the Pupil Deprivation Grant and the SchoolEffectiveness Grant, there is an additional investment of some £58million going to schools and local authorities in 2012-13 and a further8