Thank you very much for those questions. I’d just like to say that I’m working very closely with my colleagues, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and the Minister for Lifelong Learning and Welsh Language, in ensuring that the transition stages between all areas of education are as seamless as possible and that we pick up individual learner needs at those times so that we correctly identify them. This is for two reasons: one, to benefit the individual concerned, but also so that we don’t spend money needlessly several times and before somebody gets themselves into the right tracks. That’s a very expensive way of going about it.

We’re also working closely, all of us across Government, on making sure that vocational education takes its rightful place in schools and colleges in order to ensure that people go that right route in the first place and don’t go into higher education and then go back and start an apprenticeship programme where that’s inappropriate. So, we’re doing a lot of work across Government on those two aspects and I have no doubt one of us will be bringing a statement back to say how we got on with that in the autumn term. But it’s a very important point.

The other thing to say is that those companies that train in Wales do a lot of training, but we still have a stubborn number of companies that don’t do any training. We’re doing a little bit of an evangelical programme to make sure that companies that don’t currently train understand the need for it. I want to share what seems like a little bit of a trite saying, but it really says it all. If you say, as you rightly said, ‘What happens if we train people and they leave?’, the question you ought to ask is: ‘What happens if you don’t train people and they stay?’, which is a much more important question for most businesses. That’s the mindset that we want to get into our businesses: that, actually, a well-qualified and engaged workforce is more loyal, more productive and more likely to benefit your business than a low-skilled, unproductive workforce that you’re desperately hanging on to until they can desperately find somewhere else to go—that’s not the picture of the economy we’re trying to paint.

Indeed, we have several companies that are shining beacons of training. I recently visited Admiral, which has a fantastic programme of employability skills, but also just life skills, that they offer to their employees. They have exemplary retention and productivity levels inside the company as a result of that. Dŵr Cymru is another—there are several examples of that. We learn from those experiences all the way through.

So, I think that what I’m really announcing today is a comprehensive programme to pull our things together to make them more easily navigable, to persuade people that training is the right way to go to make sure that we meet the skills needs of the future and to ensure that people who have specific learning difficulties and needs are picked up in that programme as they go by putting the right identifiers in the system.