6. Will the Cabinet Secretary provide an update on the 21st Century Schools programme in Cardiff? OAQ52036

Thank you, Julie. Will the Cabinet Secretary provide an up—. Oh, sorry, that's your bit. [Laughter.] I am the Cabinet Secretary. [Laughter.] For a minute, I forgot myself and I was back over there, Presiding Officer. I've just done a Rhianon Passmore. [Interruption.] You never know. You never know.  

Julie, I am delighted to say—[Laughter.]—that band A of the twenty-first century schools and education programme will see an investment of over £164 million in schools in Cardiff over the five years ending in 2019—which might postdate when I'm going to end here. [Laughter.] A funding envelope of a further £284 million has been approved in principle for the band B programme, which will start in 2019.

I thank the Cabinet Secretary for that response. I was very pleased to visit last week the new site for the schools of Gabalfa primary and Ysgol Glan Ceubal in my constituency, Cardiff North, for the topping out ceremony last week. This is one English-medium primary and one Welsh-medium primary, which are co-located, and the building's been designed in such a way that there are joint facilities for lunchtimes and playtimes. I wondered whether there were any other plans for schools in that sort of way throughout Wales, where the Welsh language school and the English language school are co-located on the same site.

I am sure that there are other examples where we have co-locations of facilities like that. What the twenty-first century schools programme is allowing us to do is find new and innovative ways of providing school places, whether that be in a shared location, whether we see the growing number of through schools, where children are educated on the same campus from the age of three right the way through, in some cases, to the age of 18. This unprecedented investment in school buildings, the largest since the 1960s, is giving us the opportunity to provide local authorities the options of a wide variety of ways of providing educational facilities. And one of the ways in which we judge cases that come in, as I said earlier to Simon Thomas, is also on community access to those facilities and, increasingly, as we work together across Government on the childcare offer, the ability to see whether we can combine education and childcare facilities in our new builds also.

Minister, twenty-first century schools has offered the opportunity for local authorities to work with Government in redeveloping their school estate. You may or may not be familiar with the closure plans for a small rural school in the Vale of Glamorgan, Llancarfan school, and relocating to a new site in the village of Rhoose. One of the concerns—

This is a question about Cardiff.

South Wales Central area—twenty-first century schools. I thought Cardiff was part of South Wales Central. Sorry, Presiding Officer. 

The Vale of Glamorgan isn't.

It is part of South Wales Central.

The question is about Cardiff.

I withdraw the question, then.

Question 7, Dawn Bowden.