But some of the benefits are likely to be seen in the early years at school if there are reliable benefits, and I think getting it into the SAIL system will improve the opportunities for researchers very clearly. But Welsh Government has spent £600 million on this in the last 11 years and describes it as a flagship programme. Given that scale of investment, the level of assessment and understanding as to how anything really works is not, if I may say so, good enough. The evidence from Government describes the 'robust' evaluation, but I think on page 6 it's more accurately described as the 'Evaluation evidence suggests' rather than 'shows'. It accepts that the evidence is qualitative. And, actually, can't we do better than just qualitative evidence when we've spent £600 million? The fact that children are getting better in their communication, reading and counting—well, you would expect that at that age in any event. The question is: is that pace greater than that of children who are outside the programme? The fact that almost all parents interviewed 'felt' that it had a positive impact is not a sufficient evidence base if you are spending that sum of money.

I'd like to look particularly at the parenting aspect, because Welsh Government has 100 pages of guidance to local authorities on that, and it includes an appendix B: approved list of evidence-based structured group parenting programmes. There is evidence for some parenting programmes that they do work, really good academically robust evidence, but this list of 20 different programmes: three of them haven't been evaluated at all; three of them have got the top four-star rating from the National Academy of Parenting Practitioners, now the National Academy for Parenting Research, and are very good, but five of them have only the two-star rating, and what that means is that the programme is not especially good. And if Welsh Government is putting this amount of money into a programme like this, surely we want to be putting it into areas that have been evaluated and shown to work.

I ask the Minister to have a closer look at this list of parenting programmes in particular but also to work with the Early Intervention Foundation set up by Graham Allen MP and to look at their February of this year 'Evaluating early intervention programmes—Six common pitfalls, and how to avoid them'. There is really good advice there as to how Welsh Government could improve what it's spending in this area and make sure that it's being spent as well as it could be.