Mark, I know that the Cabinet Secretary for local government is more than happy to discuss with the local government family any changes to the funding formula for overall spending or, indeed, the data that are used to calculate notional spends on education. What you're talking about—that disparity in funding between individual schools—shows the complexity of the Welsh education system and why it would be extremely difficult to find a single national funding formula. How do you find a single funding formula that accounts for the needs of a school in a highly deprived area or a school, like the one in Adamsdown, where the children speak 44 different languages, compared to the challenges of delivering education in a tiny, tiny rural school, where it is inevitable that the cost per pupil in that school is going to be significantly higher than it would be in a larger establishment? I mean, we cannot, Mark—we cannot use these challenging circumstances around funding as an excuse. I know, in my own constituency, the high school that has the best results constantly tells me that because of the system that Powys County Council uses, they're the school that gets the least funding per pupil, but their results, the outcomes for their children, are better than everybody else's.

But I will try to make some progress. We will continue to work with local government, regional consortia and schools to ensure that our shared vision for improving educational outcomes for all learners in Wales is realised. Llyr, I want to give you my assurance that, where there is concern that money is either being held inappropriately at local government level, or being held inappropriately at regional consortia level, then we will go in and we will have a look at exactly how that money is or isn't getting to the front line, and there is a regional consortia at this very moment where we're doing that piece of work so that we can satisfy ourselves that my ambition to get as much resource into individual school budgets is happening.

We are providing more than £187 million over the next two years through the pupil development grant to help our most disadvantaged learning and we will invest £225 million through the education improvement grant. We're also investing £36 million to reduce class sizes, targeted at those areas that will benefit the most, and there are additional teachers being employed throughout Wales to assist us in this aim. Over this Assembly term, we're investing £100 million to raise school standards, and more than half of this investment is prioritised towards improving teaching and learning, because I recognise that our teachers are the single greatest agents of change and improvement in the classroom.

Now, Leanne, quite rightly, in her contribution, talked about the ambitious curriculum reforms that we're undergoing, and, Leanne, we will ensure that, over the next two years, the £20 million is invested specifically in the implementation and preparedness for that curriculum work. I also know that time and funding is taken up by school maintenance issues—indeed, Leanne mentioned these herself in the contribution that she made—as opposed to supporting learners. Now, I want teachers not to be worrying about those leaking roofs, I want them to be thinking about their pupils, about pedagogy and about the curriculum. So, that's why, in March, we made available an extra £14 million allocated directly to schools. This helped address small-scale maintenance issues, relieving pressures on budgets, and every single school across Wales benefited from that money, and it went directly to the front line.

Leanne also talked about the state of our school buildings. Well, Leanne, our twenty first century schools programme represents the largest single investment in building new schools and colleges since the 1960s—£1.4 billion will be invested over band— [Interruption.]