Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:43 pm on 1 May 2018.
Thank you very much, David, for those series of observations and questions. Just to reassure you, Tom Crick remains an integral part of support for Government on these areas. He chairs one of the networks of excellence, and I notice from his Twitter feed today that he has very much welcomed the announcement and thinks that it's a really important thing that we've done today in terms of the investment in Swansea and Cardiff.
With regard to coding, gosh, I'm so old that even I remember doing BASIC, and I'm so old I did O-levels. When I did an O-level in computer science, in fact, Beverley Thomas and I were the only two girls in the class. It was either computer science or scripture, so Beverley Thomas and I went to do computer science, the only two girls in the class, and we learnt BASIC.
I think the issue about coding, I wouldn't want us to be in a position where we said to schools, 'That's the only coding programme that you should use', because first of all, there's a developmental issue there. So, for instance, you wouldn't want to start your very youngest children on Python, for instance—it's probably too advanced for them—but you probably would want to start your youngest children on Blockly, which gives them the basic understanding of instructions, and then you would build them up to something like Python. So, you don't want to just say to schools, 'That's the only one—' [Interruption.] Like you know anything about it. [Laughter.] Nice try. But you wouldn't want to say that's the only language that we would use in school. But what we do need is to develop the skills of those teachers within our schools. You're quite right; many of the teachers are being taught by the young people themselves, and trying to keep pace with them is a real challenge for the staff, and that's why we need to develop our national learning programme for all staff, so, no matter where they are in Wales, they can have access to a professional development programme that is going to assist them in many, many different ways. Thank you.