Thank you, Presiding Officer, and thank you to Llyr. Llyr, I’ve sat where you are and asked those questions, but I can assure you that no amount of hand-wringing and complaining about what has gone on in the past is going to take us forward. My job is to ensure that we move forward because that’s the only way we are going to see the improvements that we need. Now, you are right, there have been concerns expressed around the difference between the pioneer and the non-pioneer network and we are addressing those concerns, as I outlined to you in questions last week. But it is absolutely my intention to ensure that the curriculum is delivered on time. You asked whether we will be pausing to learn the lessons of this set of PISA results—there are many, many things in this set of PISA results that we need to reflect on and ensure that our reform agenda addresses it.

So, in particular on the issue of science, we know that across England—sorry, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the reasons why we have done badly in science is because of the drop in performance of our highest performers. I believe that is directly related to decisions not to have high levels of ambition for our children in sciences in our schools, and that we’ve have some schools that almost predominantly have only entered their children for BTEC science, which we now recognise has not equipped them with the scientific reasoning skills that they need to succeed at a higher level. We’ve made it quite clear—of our expectations and the reform of our GCSE science papers that are being taught from this September—that that has to change.

But it’s not just in science where our more able and talented children have not performed as well as we would have expected them to. There has been, over many years—quite rightly—a large focus on level 2 plus indicators as performance measures for schools, because we needed to up the number of Welsh children who were leaving schools with five good GCSEs including their English, maths or Welsh first language. But I recognise that in doing that, perhaps we have taken the opportunity not, at the same time, to push our most able learners. That’s why capped point scores will now be included as part of the accountability measures for our secondary schools. It cannot be beyond the wit of us to be able to ensure we turn Ds into Cs but also to be able to turn Bs into As and As into A*s. Our system should be able to make the most of every child’s talents and opportunities, and that will be reflected in our accountability measures to ensure our more able children are being stretched. That’s why our expectations for children leaving primary school—where once it was level 4, we now expect children to be leaving primary school at a level 5. So, our expectations across the piece are about raising standards and demanding more of our education system, so that our brightest children aren’t just left at level 4—because that’s all the Welsh Government asks us to do—but that our brightest children are pushed to the next level, to level 5.

With regard to targets, again I’ve been there. I’ve never actually asked for the setting of PISA targets in all the questions that I’ve asked the First Minister because you can hit the target and miss the entire point. We have seen—we have seen that perhaps in the past some of those targets were misconceived. I’m absolutely clear that we need to improve our scores, not within the margin of error, but we need statistically robust improvements in our schools, and that is my expectation.