Thank you, Vikki. One of the things that the OECD told us was (1) yes, we have to do more about leadership, but, secondly, we have to get better at recognising success and celebrating success. I think, sometimes, there’s something intrinsic in the Welsh psyche—if we were Americans, we’d be shouting from the rooftops, but there’s something intrinsic about us as Welsh people not to want to be boastful or to be too brash. That’s why we are looking at a number of ways in which we can, indeed, celebrate success and recognition. Most recently, we’ve launched the first ever Wales teaching awards, and a very uplifting experience it was too. We’re actively looking at Welsh Government scholarships for headteachers and educational professionals to gain the opportunity to study further, and have them held up as Welsh scholars. We’re looking at ways in which we can go on to enhance the reputation of training in Wales, but, ultimately, a lot of this will come down to the quality of our initial teacher education, and the provision by the academy. I want people to aspire to come to a Welsh institution to train to be a teacher, because they are the best institutions that deliver that training.

Time is a real issue, and constrictions in budgets do make time for professional learning a real challenge. That’s why we’ve got to be much more creative about how we provide professional learning opportunities not in the very old-fashioned way. There is so much to be gained simply by department-to-department working. One of the real challenges we’ve got in schools is not that that school is better than that school over there in another county; it’s actually in-school variation. We can have high-performing departments in one area and a low-performing department in another area. Actually getting the school itself to work together to raise standards internally is a potential professional learning opportunity that I would like to see happen more.

But this has to be taken as a whole package. The academy of leadership on its own will not succeed without our reforms to initial teacher education, without our professional standards. So, it’s very important that we look at all of this in the picture, and this is about, as I said, creating an education system that is a source of national pride, confidence, and holds the profession up to be the high-status profession we would all want it to be.