Can I also make a declaration of interest as a school governor? I’m very grateful for your statement today, Minister, and, indeed, for the briefing that you and your officials provided last week. I know that you are personally very committed to addressing the shortcomings in our existing statutory framework for learners with additional needs, and I do appreciate the way in which you’ve responded to the concerns that have been expressed by the children’s commissioner and all of the other stakeholders following the publication of the draft legislation earlier this year. We all know that the current system isn’t working, and you’ve alluded to the fact that many people spend far too long having to fight the system in order to get the support that they need for their children at present, and it simply isn’t good enough. When you consider the fact that just 23 per cent of pupils with additional learning needs last year achieved five GCSEs or more compared with 59 per cent of their peers, we know that the system simply isn’t working. We’ve got to improve our game.

We very much welcome some of the provisions in the Bill. I appreciate the work that you’ve done to extend the scope of the Bill right up to the age of 25 so that young people accessing college and other places of education are able to benefit from some support, and, indeed, the redress opportunities that come if they don’t get that support. They currently don’t have that, of course. And I also appreciate the work that you’ve done in order to improve the Bill in terms of making sure that we’re holding the national health service to account for the provision of access to health professionals and, indeed, for them to meet their obligations to meet the individual needs of learners. We also appreciate the work that you’ve done to increase the emphasis on Welsh-medium support, and I very much welcome the comments that you made in response to Llyr Huws Gruffydd on that.

But I do have some concerns. I know that I’ve discussed some of these with you, but I think it’s important that we also put them on the record here in the Chamber, particularly in relation to those learners with health needs. They may not have additional learning needs, but they may have health needs that require some interventions in the classroom or their place of learning. Those with diabetes, epilepsy and other conditions, for example, are not currently within the scope of the Bill, but it may well be necessary to manage their conditions during the school day, during educational hours, to ensure that their needs are met so that they can sustain their learning in the classroom. I’m very concerned that, with them not being included in the Bill, we may well be falling foul of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. So, I would appreciate it, Minister—and you’ve already indicated that you’re prepared to look at amendments to the Bill in the future and I know that that’s a genuine offer, as it were—if you could consider that more widely and perhaps tell us what you might do to address those particular concerns.

The Bill also, of course, fails to touch on home-to-school transport, specifically. We know that this Assembly passed legislation in the learner travel Measure many years back in respect of home-to-school transport, but some individuals require special home-to-school transport arrangements by virtue of their additional learning needs or by virtue of their health needs, particularly if they’ve got very long journeys to school, as is often the case in rural parts of Wales. So, I wonder whether you might tell us whether the code that is well under way, in terms of the working on the code, will actually address some of those issues.

One of the important features, of course, in the Bill is the introduction of these new individual development plans and the support that they will underpin. You’ve made it quite clear in the past, although not in your statement today, that one of the main features of that is that it’s going to be portable between local authorities in Wales, so that people don’t have to face what can be a devastating upheaval if they relocate from one local authority to the next and they then have to restart the battle, reboot the battle, with the new local authority to get the support that their child needs in school. I know that that is something that this Bill seeks to address by ensuring that there will be that portability, but that is only portability within Wales, of course, particularly in my part of north Wales and, indeed, in other parts of Wales, the issue of people relocating from one country to the next, into Wales, is an issue. I wonder, Minister, whether you can tell us what your plans are in terms of making sure that there are some short-term interim arrangements for those pupils moving from an education system elsewhere in the UK into Wales with a package of support that they’ve been used to having, and whether that is something you would expect local authorities and schools to continue to maintain in the short term, while they transition into our new framework, once this Bill ends up being law in Wales.

The education sector unions quite rightly have expressed some concerns regarding the demands that the new legislation might place upon the education workforce. You’ve touched on this in your response to Llyr Huws Gruffydd, just in terms of the capacity building that needs to be done within the education workforce. I know that you’ve made some resources available to upskill the workforce, and I think everybody in this Chamber would want a professionalised workforce dealing with what can be a very specialised area, but, clearly, the capacity of smaller schools in particular is going to be a challenge to meet these new obligations. I wonder whether you can tell us whether you want to see schools working together to ensure that they have adequate specialism being developed, which is local to them, as it were, and easily accessible to them, in order that the vision that this Bill seeks to achieve is actually fulfilled.

Can you also give us some assurances about the access to health professionals? We’ve heard about educational psychologists, and many of us in this Chamber have been lobbied by educational psychologists about the need for them to be involved, as appropriate, in ensuring that there’s an appropriate package of support, but what about speech therapists and other health professionals who, sometimes, a parent or a school may not know they need to access in order to ensure that a young person is adequately assessed? I just wonder whether the code might have something to say on this and about that sort of access, particularly for those parents who may be trying to navigate what is a complex system, sometimes for the very first time.

Finally, just on transition to the new arrangements, this is a cause of quite a bit of anxiety at the moment, particularly for parents and pupils that are already in the current system receiving excellent support, in some cases, across the country. Many of those parents will be very concerned that the new arrangements may mean that their children get less support in the future. I think it’s important, Minister, for you to put on the record some sort of guarantee about the support being provided to them: that that will not be diminished as a result of the Bill, and that those children who are already in the system, receiving support—. Yes, absolutely, it is appropriate that that support is reviewed from time to time, but there’s nothing in this Bill that would cause that support to be diminished of right to those children. I think, perhaps, Minister, if you could give us some assurances on that, it would be very welcome. As I said at the start, I’m very pleased to see the Bill being published. I very much appreciate the way in which you’ve been working on a cross-party basis, and with stakeholders thus far. I look forward to working with you to improve this Bill through the legislative process before it finally becomes law.