Schools are calling out for concrete information about when this will happen—that is to say, when this major retraining will occur. Will it happen during school hours, outwith school hours, on additional inset days? How will it be done? We do need an idea about the financial investment that will be allocated to this—more detail, if you like. You've allocated £100,000, I think, for ongoing development or continuous development, but is this sufficient? Releasing teachers is expensive. It all needs to be planned very carefully beforehand, and we need to recognise the scale of the task facing us, and we need to emphasise that this includes classroom teachers, classroom assistants, and the school leaders. I am aware that CPD won't be part of the White Paper, but I do think that the questions raised by teachers and unions are very pertinent indeed.

My second question is on assessment arrangements, and you have mentioned that you will publish further detail on that in the spring. At the moment, before we have that information, teachers are concerned that they don't have a clear idea of the nature of the assessment methods that will run alongside the curriculum. We know about the annual adaptive tests, and we know about significant changes in terms of the broader accountability issues, but, in terms of the progress steps and the attainment outcomes, it would be good to have more clarity on all of this, and I assume that the intention is to move away from teacher assessment as it currently stands at the moment.

Now, another huge question, which nobody seems to be able to tackle at the moment, is: what will the impact of the changes to the curriculum be on qualifications, as Suzy alluded to? You did start to answer the question, but we do need clarity very soon on this issue. You said that 2026 is a long way off, but no, it isn’t, because the first cohort of pupils that will have followed the new curriculum—those in year 7 in September 2022—will reach year 10 and they will start GCSE courses in September 2025. Working back from that point, the schedules for those courses will have to have been published by 2024 so that teachers have time for preparation. There is huge work to be done, first of all, by Qualifications Wales, in terms of setting the criteria, and then by the WJEC, and any other awarding bodies who may be interested in qualifications, in terms of drawing up those qualifications and going through Qualification Wales's validation processes. Now, I know that, quite understandably, you’ve sought to avoid having the nature of the qualifications having too much of an influence on the curriculum, but the time has now come to actually make some robust decisions in this area.

Turning now to an issue that is a cause for concern for me, namely the Welsh aspects of this curriculum, and the Welsh identity of the curriculum, I would like to know how much emphasis there will be on Welsh history, for example. You talk about a Welsh dimension, but I am talking about a curriculum that is rooted in the Welsh experience, and I do think that there is a difference there, and I would like some clarity on that issue. There are questions that arise about the framework for the Welsh language, and what the assessment arrangements will be there, and there is a major question, which isn’t being answered at the moment, about what the nature of the qualification or qualifications will be in terms of the Welsh language. There is a lack of clarity about that, and that is a cause for concern; there is a vacuum there, and I would appreciate a little more meat on the bones, as it were.

Finally, I turn to an issue that Suzy started to address, which is on page 35 of the consultation document, and here it says that there will be

‘Duty on all schools and Funded Nursery Settings to teach English as a compulsory element of the new curriculum for Wales.’

Now, that strikes me as being very strange, in these days where the cylchoedd meithrin run by Mudiad Ysgolion Meithrin do provide their provision through the medium of Welsh. And every expert opinion in this area has emphasised that the immersion of children in the Welsh language, at that very early age, is the best way of producing children who are fluent Welsh speakers. And a statement such as that one does raise a number of questions, I believe, and it has frightened Mudiad Ysgolion Meithrin without doubt, and it appears to me to run contrary to the aim of a million Welsh speakers. So, I would like to know whether that is an error if truth be told, It’s such a strange and unexpected statement in the current context in Wales. It strikes me that it may be a mistake.

So—