I believe that there is a huge amount of value to be placed on an internal exercise that looks at the strengths and the weaknesses of an individual institution and, more importantly, what steps are going to be taken to make that institution better. We know, from all the international evidence and research, that schools as learning organisations are a feature of high-performing education systems, and that's what I want for the children of Wales. But we also know that self-evaluation does need to have an element of peer review. That's why we will have schools working together to provide that. Not only does it provide an excellent opportunity to verify an internal exercise, it promotes the spirit of collaboration between our schools—something that we have not been good at in our system in the past, and we need to improve upon. And that was one of the features of the OECD report into the Welsh education system.

The validation will be carried out by Estyn. The Member says maybe we should just leave all of this to Estyn, but, realistically, the inspection cycle would leave huge gaps when Estyn would be able to get to a school. This will be an annual process that will be undertaken, and therefore we can have real live time. One of the problems of our current inspection system is that a school can go many, many, many years before Estyn comes back to inspect that school again. And, you know, for better or for worse, an inspection report can become out of date quite quickly. I know of schools that have moved immeasurably in a short period of time, and also we have schools that have done well, and there's lots of evidence of this across the border in England, where a school has done well and then, after inspection, performance and standards drop immediately because the threat of an inspection report isn't due for years and years' time. So, actually, this gives us a much better, and a much more robust, system where these things are being constantly looked at and challenged.

I have no plans to change the current model of education funding, but, of course, I will look at every opportunity to maximise school budgets and maximise the amount of investment that the Welsh Government can put into our education system.