Having made this connection, I think that will, then, complete it, but I haven’t looked at the detail recently. Frankly, if it doesn’t deviate the road, we’ll have to take other measures to ensure it does. I just wanted to use this opportunity to speak about the childcare offer in ‘Taking Wales Forward’ and look at the amount of money that’s been allocated so far to delivering that pledge. There’s £10 million this year in the communities and children’s budget to pilot the childcare pledge for 30 hours a week for 48 weeks a year, which is a very ambitious pledge, which I welcome greatly. There’s a further £20 million allocated in the education budget for the following year to invest in childcare settings alongside the twenty-first century schools programme. I note that Carl Sargeant has told the children and young people’s committee, back in November, that the current best estimate of the annual cost of delivering the childcare pledge overall is £100 million. So, 30 hours of free early education and childcare to the working parents of three and four-year olds—obviously, all those children are entitled to 10 hours of nursery education from the term after their third birthday. So, the challenge is providing the other 20 hours of childcare, plus 30 hours during school holidays.

Early years provision in Wales has focused on the developmental needs of young children to date. Both the foundation phase and Flying Start are founded on evidence of what makes the greatest impact on children’s life chances, but they’re costly strategies. A Flying Start childcare place in Wales costs £11.32 compared to £5.62 an hour that a childcare provider in England receives for a deprived childcare place. In Cardiff, there are particular challenges in meeting this very exciting pledge. We have 26 primary schools with nursery provision at the moment, but simply extending the hours children are in school to 30 isn’t possible because 3,300 places are mainly delivered in two cohorts. So, you have the morning nursery and the afternoon nursery, all in the same room. So, other solutions are going to have to be found and, in any case, inner-city schools have little spare capacity to expand because they’re simply hedged in by other buildings.

There are some good examples of wraparound care in my constituency at Ysgol y Berllan Deg, which has a private bilingual nursery at the bottom of the garden, and at Roath Park Primary School, which has a private nursery just around the corner. In both cases, they’re close enough to school for three-year-olds to walk over there for their nursery entitlement. These are good examples of public-private collaboration, but other parts of my constituency are unlikely to see market solutions to deliver this pledge. One such area is the Pentwyn ward, which is the largest housing estate in Wales. The only childcare offer at the moment is from childminders. I recently visited the excellent Ely children’s centre, which is in the Cabinet Secretary’s constituency, which provides outstanding nursery education and childcare as well as professional leadership for other early years providers. But it’s the only children’s centre in the whole of Cardiff: the fastest-growing city in the UK and the largest in Wales. My own view is there’s going to be a need for a lot more children centres like Ely if the 30-hours pledge is going to be delivered to all working parents, not just the ones in the better-off areas where the market will provide. There’s some evidence of that from the English experience. So, I think this is an issue that we need to consider further when we’re discussing the budget in future years.