Can I thank Darren for his series of questions? Perhaps I can start where he left off. In one breath, Darren says, 'You're spending too much money on PDG, and that is at the expense of non-PDG children in schools,' but then he says, 'Why haven't you introduced an Ever 6?' [Interruption.] 'Why haven't you introduced an Ever 6?' I would love—and have looked very carefully at the principle of being able to introduce an Ever 6 system here with the Welsh PDG. I simply don't have the resources available to do that. To be able to implement an Ever 6 would do what Darren has just accused me of doing—prioritising the spending on this grant over other children. Now, Darren, I would agree with you that free school meals might not be the perfect proxy for what constitutes disadvantage, but, at this present time and in the absence of anything else, that's the best proxy that we have at the moment.

Darren also asked about the issue of best practice. Increasingly, we are aware of what works for our most disadvantaged children, and we have already issued guidance to both schools and to individual regional consortia around the use of an evidence-based approach to spending these resources. One of the most accessible resources is the Sutton Trust toolkit, which I know that Darren and the committee are very, very familiar with, as evidence-based interventions that we know work. Darren will also know, from the evidence I gave to the committee just before the Easter recess, that we are considering looking at a Welsh version of the Sutton Trust toolkit, building on Welsh interventions, Welsh experience, and what we know is working here in our schools. But, as I said in my opening statement, Estyn have themselves said that this is one grant where there is extensive evidence that schools are indeed using the evidence to direct their investments.

Darren asked about the issue about the 2016 PLASC data and the use of PLASC data. What's important to understand is that PDG allocations have always been behind—that's how they always have been. Darren asked a very reasonable question—why have we chosen 2016 as the base for the next two years? I have done so for a very simple reason, acting Presiding Officer. We have used that data because it is what allows me to get the most money into the system, because, actually, because of a whole range of factors, free school meal eligibility is dropping. So, 2016 gives me more money than using 2017 data, and we've frozen it for two years in consultation with the profession, because we simply do not know, at this stage, what the effect of the roll-out of universal credit will be on free school meals on Wales. It could present us with changes in behaviour that could see huge fluctuations in free school meal take-up and, therefore, big fluctuations in individual schools' budgets. We have taken the decision that it is better—it is better—to be able to provide certainty of resource for schools for the next two years for planning, rather than take a chance on what the impact of universal credit will be on the free school meal provision, because I simply do not know. Given the fact that I would be first to admit, Darren, that these are challenging financial times for our schools, certainty over that budget is what is important to those practitioners, and the 2016 data gives me more money than the 2017 data would have, and I'm trying to get as much money into the system as I possibly can. And that's the reason for that investment.

The figures in 2017 are complex, and, whilst no direct comparisons are able to be made, I was very clear in my statement that those children were less resilient to the changes to the examinations than their better-off peers, and we have to be clear about why that is, and there are a host of reasons—everything from tier 2 vocabulary and oracy levels that are needed now to get a maths qualification, through to people being taken out of other core subjects to get them through their maths and their English. There are a host of reasons, but I'm also exploring this with our independent overseers of our qualification system, Qualifications Wales, to get a better understanding. But let's be clear: there are some schools where their free-school-meal pupils did better than their non-free-school-meal pupils. So, Cefn Hengoed in Swansea: those entitled to free school meals did better in their GCSEs last year than their better-off counterparts. There are certain schools within the city of Cardiff with very similar levels of uptake of free school meals. Some of those schools have got significant numbers of those pupils getting their level 2 plus, and a similar cohort in the same city have not done so well. And that variation in the system, where some schools have been able to insulate their free-school-meal pupils and push them on, and have been successful in doing so, and schools in the very same city have not been able to do so, is of concern to me, and that is why we will be expecting our PDG co-ordinators in our regional consortia to ensure that best practice—where those schools that are bucking the trend and their pupils are doing well, that good practice is shared consistently across all schools. Because if some can do it then all should be able to do it.