Well, well, well, Cabinet Secretary, this is another fine mess that Carwyn has gotten you into. I have to say, I do appreciate your statement and the briefing that was provided by your officials this morning, and, of course, you’ve spent recent weeks desperately downplaying expectations in respect of today’s results, and we can, of course, all see now why that has been the case.

The children of Wales deserve a first-class, world-beating education system, but the reality is that successive Welsh Labour-led Governments have failed to deliver one. In spite of all the tough talking, all of the promises to do better from the First Minister and previous Cabinet Secretaries, today’s figures leave us yet again languishing at the bottom half of the global education league table, and they reconfirm our shameful status as the worst-performing school system in the United Kingdom. That our results in 2015 were actually worse than back in 2006 signifies a decade of underachievement and a scandal of monumental proportions. And that’s not the half of it: there’s been a sustained decline in science skills since 2006, especially for the highest achieving pupils.

One third of Welsh pupils were deemed to have been low achievers in one or more subjects—the worst performance in the UK. Welsh reading scores were on a par with Hungary and Lithuania. Pupils in England are three times more likely to be higher achievers in science, reading and maths than here in Wales. And while there’s a smaller gap in achievement between people from the wealthiest and poorest backgrounds here in Wales, PISA suggests that this is mainly due to the most advantaged pupils in Wales not performing as well as they ought to be. Welsh pupils are doing more learning outside of the school than their English counterparts, yet still they perform more poorly. These results are a litany of failure—failure by successive Welsh Governments to raise our game.

Now, Cabinet Secretary, your statement suggests that we need to give the reforms that are taking place more time and more time to bed in, but the Welsh Government—and I appreciate you’ve only recently joined the Welsh Government—. Successive Welsh Governments, have had a decade, since 2006, yet have still failed to deliver improvements. Now, tell us: how is it that countries like Poland have been able to turn their education systems around in less than a decade, but the Welsh Government can’t? Poland are managing to sustain that improvement, too.

Now, I am not arguing that the reshaping of the curriculum shouldn’t continue or that the literacy and numeracy frameworks, which were developed by some of your predecessors, should be abandoned. We don’t want you to, and I quote you, ‘rip up the plan’, as you said in your statement, but these things alone are not going to deliver the sea-change in the PISA rankings that you need to deliver. And we must recognise that similar reforms to the curriculum in Scotland, which have been implemented and are further down the line and have bedded in, have not delivered improvement there. In fact, their performance in the PISA results today in reading and science have deteriorated too. Instead, what we need from you, Cabinet Secretary, is a clear strategy with some measurable targets that will sit alongside other pieces of work to turn this performance around. And not just in science, but in maths and reading, too. Our children and our young people deserve nothing less. So, tell us: will you develop such a strategy, and, if so, when will we see it published? Will you set some targets and timetables and stick to them, unlike your predecessors who set targets and abandoned them as they saw time slipping through their fingers, or kicked them down the line?

Will you release good and successful schools in Wales from the shackles that currently prevent them from expanding? Will you do more to support able and talented learners to allow them to fly and reach their potential? Will you trust teaching professionals more so that they can innovate, develop their skills and learn from one another’s good practice, and will you stop closing good schools in communities the length and breadth of Wales and instead invest in them? Will you also introduce PISA type tests into our classrooms on a regular basis so that our young children can familiarise themselves with the sorts of challenge that might come in terms of a PISA test in the future? Because these are the sorts of changes that we would introduce if we were in Government.

Will you also learn, because you have failed to do so so far as a Government—and as I say, I recognise you have recently joined the clan—from international examples such as Poland and some of the others, and you quoted some of the others, who have succeeded in improving their performance and maintaining it? Let’s not forget, Poland found itself with very similar scores to the ones that have been published today back in 2000, and they managed to turn things around by 2009 and they’re now well up there in the top 20.

Cabinet Secretary, these PISA rankings are important. They provide an international benchmark for the performance of our education system, which can impact on investment and employment in future generations. If these things go unchecked, if this poor performance continues and goes untackled, then it will be devastating for Wales. Holding steady to the course alone is not the answer to our problems; we’ve got to be more ambitious, we’ve got to be more bold. Future generations are counting on you, and we want to see what action you’re going to take.