Schools in Wales will not reopen until at least June according to the First Minister.
Speaking on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday, Mr Drakeford outlined the Welsh Government's priorities for children returning to school. He said that "three weeks as a minimum" would be needed to plan a reopening. The headteachers' union NAHT Cymru called the comments "confusing and unhelpful".
Mr Drakeford said: "Our advice from the trade unions and from the local education authorities is that we will need three weeks as a minimum from the point we decided to do that to when schools can reopen. So we are talking the beginning of June there."
The First Minister outlined the groups of children the Welsh Government is considering allowing to return to school quickest.
The groups include:
- Children with special educational needs
- Year six children
- Children who learn in Welsh but don't have Welsh speakers at home
He said: "We are thinking about ways we can bring young people special education needs back into education.
"We are thinking about individual year groups. Year six children in primary schools, children going up to secondary schools this September. We know that is a right of passage. You do it with your classmates and yet you won’t have seen those friends for six weeks so can we bring those children back to school earlier?
"We have a bilingual education system here in Wales, children are learning in the medium of Welsh but may not have Welsh spoken at home, do we need to get those children back into education sooner. Those are the sorts of things we are working on."
The First Minister added that they needed to convince teachers and parents it was safe for children to return and that social distancing could be maintained.
Mr Drakeford said: "You certainly can’t have schools reopen as they did before and sustain social distancing. And you need social distancing for public health reasons but you also need it in order to persuade parents and teachers that you are asking young people to come back into an environment that is safe for them.
"And that is the other big piece of work we are doing at the moment. You can open anything that you like but if people don’t think it is safe to go there then they will vote with their feet.
"I think of this as a phased way we are not going to have all the children back in all of the schools on the same day. We get those children in whom we have the greatest priority to begin with, we monitor that carefully, we add more children in as we are confident that we can do that safely and over time we will get back to something like normal we were used to."
