Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I’m very pleased to return to education and the OECD in the unavoidable absence of my colleague, Llyr Gruffydd, and I’d like to thank the Cabinet Secretary for her statement. Can I say, first of all, that Plaid Cymru, at least since the initial OECD report and ‘Qualified for Life’, has taken a broadly supportive view of this path that has been set out for Welsh education, particularly focusing on leadership and strengthening leadership amongst our educational leaders, and a focus, as well, on evidence and on what works and away from constant new initiatives? In that regard, the report from the OECD confirms that that part of the journey has been undertaken by this Government so far.

I have to say, however, I would be interested to have heard the Cabinet Secretary when she was still on the other side of the Chamber responding to this statement, which was rather thin on the ground in terms of actions that would arise from this report and outcomes, particularly firmer outcomes. I think I have five areas that I’d like to ask her particular questions on as regard to how we might see those outcomes.

To begin with, the resources that the Cabinet Secretary is likely to put behind this process: back in November, she told the education committee in the budget scrutiny that the OECD findings would influence her final decisions about how the £20 million to be allocated for raising standards in 2017-18 would be allocated. Yet, today, the statement does not actually set out how she intends to allocate that £20 million. I think the time since last November—. I would have hoped that, by now, we’d understand better where that £20 million is going to be used and in what way.

She’s already returned and talked about class sizes, so I won’t say too much about that, other than to say that I take from her statement that she still intends to spend £6 million on something that has limited evidence behind it. The 2016 OECD report that she just called in evidence did not refer to nursery classes and the beginners’ classes that her actual policy addresses. But if she’s determined to go ahead with that then I certainly want to understand where the £20 million that she’s already talked about will be spent.

The second area I think we’d like to look at is around the leadership in general, and this is the one where the Welsh education sector has been weakest over many years and has not had the focus from Welsh Government, either, that it now has, and quite rightly so. There are a couple of aspects around this, around how we might strengthen leadership, that I’d like to understand. It’s still not clear to me—and this is not an OECD matter, this is more a Welsh Government matter—where the Government sees leadership really being driven forward. Of course, from the top, by the Cabinet Secretary—but then also is it the consortia or the schools or the pioneer schools that will be doing much of this work? There is still an unanswered question, both in the OECD report and in the statement from the Cabinet Secretary today, about what exactly are consortia doing now in driving leadership forward, and whether they are still relevant to the journey that she has supported in her statement today. So, consistency of leadership, but also in what way the consortia themselves—as the OECD report suggests that they should be also investing and raising their own capacity for leadership, I’d like to understand what specific things the Secretary will be looking for from consortia to ensure that happens.

That relates to, in my view, the national academy for educational leadership, which the Cabinet Secretary mentioned in her statement. What she didn’t say in the statement, and what I’d like to know, is when she expects now the first of the leaders to come out of this academy. She says that she’s going to accelerate the development of it. Can we expect, therefore, in September this year that we will see people actually, if you like, graduating from that—[Interruption.] Yes, it’s not started yet, I know, but we want to see something, and I’d like to see a date from the Secretary, which wasn’t in the statement, about how we might see this bedding on the ground and people coming out of the academy and working hard in that way to be the leaders and be seen to be the leaders as well, which I think is quite important in that regard.

It was a key Plaid Cymru pledge in our manifesto for the Assembly elections that we would introduce specialist business managers, as, indeed, has been confirmed in the OECD report, particularly for rural schools in a cluster format or federated format. Though she did reply to Darren Millar’s point on this, I’d appreciate a little more detail about how she might actually encourage that process. Again, maybe it’s the consortia that could be doing some of this, rather than schools themselves voluntarily coming together. But it’s a key thing that takes that burden away and allows headteachers to really teach and lead in the teaching standards.

The final point I wanted to make was, though I very much welcome the OECD’s initial work on Welsh education in 2014 and welcome this stock-take report, if you like, now—and I put on record that I regard Andreas Schleicher as a friend of Welsh education and somebody who’s helped us all understand a lot more of what we need to do in the field of education in Wales—I do wonder whether it’s possibly the next time, in a year or two, that you look at the progress, that you would commission a completely independent evaluator to look at this. Because we’ve had the OECD suggest the journey we need to take, then the OECD say whether the Welsh Government has been on the journey that the OECD wanted us to take. Though I have a great deal of respect, and I think the OECD is to be valued for its high-quality work and its thorough independence in itself, I think it would be good for everyone, including the teaching profession themselves, if we saw that, the next time the Cabinet Secretary commissioned a stock take of her approach and her success and her Government’s success on this matter, that’s done by a completely independent evaluator.