Thank you. Corporate parenting is all our responsibility, so I completely share David Melding and Helen Mary's comments on this matter.

Last night, I attended a dinner organised by the faculty of sexual and reproductive healthcare, along with my colleagues Julie Morgan and Angela Burns. It was done on the Chatham House rule where everything remained in the room, but I was really shocked to hear that in one local authority in Wales nearly all of the care-experienced children come from 10 families, and that's because we've failed to provide the service that we need to to ensure that people don't go on simply having more children. So, I was very pleased to see that you're now going to have regional Reflect services, because that's what these services are about; it's not supporting families to get their child that's been removed back, but enabling them to reflect on the reasons why that child was taken into care in the first place.

I'm less impressed by your description of it as a 'popular' service. I want to know whether it's an effective service. I think that it very much depends on the quality of the outreach to ensure that those who most need such a service are actually getting it, rather than abandoning them to just going on having more and more children, with a vicious cycle.

I was interested to see the research that's been done on placements and the positive outcomes, but of 42 pupils in the school where I'm a governor, which I'm afraid is the highest in Wales, already three have had a change of placement, but, I'm glad to say, not a change of school. So, at least there is some continuity and stability in their lives that can be provided at the school.

I think that another thing that's been very important in terms of preventative and joined-up social work is that having a social worker located at the school has enabled them to access important information about the background of the young person in a timely fashion, without in any way breaching data protection rules. So, I think that we need to do a lot more of that sort of thing. I appreciate that you're going to allocate £15 million more to reduce the need for children to be in care, but we have to recognise that we are an outlier at the moment—95 per 10,000 pupils/children versus 62 to 10,000 in England—so, there's no room for complacency in this.    

I think that we simply have to—. The importance of the school, it seems to me, was reflected in Kirsty Williams's statement about the importance of well-being, just as much as academic achievement, and celebrating the work that's done by schools. So, I think that the national outcomes framework, as part of the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014, has only got one indicator in relation to care-experienced children, relating to the external qualifications they get when they're 16. I think there needs to be further indicators of the type of really specialist work that schools can do to really contribute to that.

Being in care is an adverse childhood experience; it couldn't possibly be otherwise. So, the numerically small numbers we have surely means we should be ensuring that all those young people are getting proper access to mental health services and counselling services to enable them to process the trauma that they have suffered. I absolutely think that we need to be ensuring in all local authorities that all these young people are getting those services they need, or they are going to end up being parents of care-experienced children themselves, and that is the vicious circle we've got to breach. Otherwise, it's going to cost local authorities money we simply don't have, because the investigation that was done by a national newspaper about the level of cost for very specialist care—£7,000 a week—and the real concerns about auctioning of vulnerable children—. Obviously, we have to put a stop to that and we need to get to the bottom of ensuring that we are reducing the numbers and that those who are care experienced are not themselves going to lose their own children.