Thank you, David. I would like to say that absence from secondary schools has dropped faster for free-school-meal pupils than for any other pupils over the last five years. Since 2009-10, it has dropped 3.6 percentage points, whereas for others it dropped by 2.6, so we’re making better progress for children on free school meals than we are with the rest of the cohort. But there is still more to do, because we know that regular attendance at school is the best chance that children have to gain the positive experience and the qualifications that they need. I would expect schools to have carried out work to understand the reasons why some children are persistently missing from school, but I would indeed want to commend not only the good practice that you have highlighted in schools that you are familiar with, but also of other schools I’ve visited.

This summer, I visited Cefn Hengoed Community School in Swansea. They’ve focused on improving attendance through employing an attendance officer, with a particular focus on free-school-meal learners. Since 2012, the school reports that the average attendance of free-school-meal learners has risen by 6.9 per cent, so there is good practice out there. I would expect individual schools to take this issue seriously, and I would expect regional consortia to be working in schools across their region to ensure that, where good practice is happening and good results are being delivered by schools on this agenda, that good practice is employed in other schools where progress is not as good as you or I would want it to be.