I very much liked the focus in your report on the fundamental motor skills that children need to develop at an early age, and the misconception that all the skills that they require will develop naturally in childhood just by running around, and this is absolutely incorrect. Just as one of your witnesses says, you wouldn't expect people to learn to read by chucking a bag of letters at them and assuming that literacy would emerge from the chaos. So, I appreciate the fact that your report has identified this gap in the foundation phase in terms of teaching these motor and co-ordination skills, which obviously—. It really affects children's confidence if they don't have those skills, because that's how they form friendships, and if they can't do things that their peers can do, it's going to be very disabling for them.

So, I absolutely agree that schools have a vital role to play in getting children and young people to be more physically active, but I think the problem needs to be addressed much earlier than that. I note, from the Government's response, that there's going to be increasing measurement of babies and toddlers' weight, and I would like to assume that we are using those contact opportunities to ask their carers about the physical activity that they're engaging in, as well as the diet the child is following. I appreciate the fact that the Government has accepted recommendation 3 about the importance of a whole-family approach to those children at risk of obesity, and I wondered if the Government is considering the success of HENRY in Leeds, which is a whole-system approach to early education and the parents of young children, which indicated that in Leeds the obesity rates of children starting in reception have actually gone down, which in the rest of the country is going the other way. 

So, there must be something right about what this HENRY intervention is doing, which of course relies on training up volunteers to work on a one-to-one support programme to enable families who are disadvantaged, who are less likely to engage with statutory service to access the healthy families programme. I think that the work that's been done by HENRY has—. There's lots of evidence that it is one of the most statistically significant in delivering sustained changes in parenting, diet, physical activity, emotional well-being and lifestyle habits. All of these things go together. If people are not physically active, as Angela Burns has already highlighted, they are unlikely to be emotionally and mentally very well either. I note that they are actually working around many regions of England, and some of the work that they are doing is training staff in English children's centres. So, my question to the Government is: have you considered using this programme in Wales, and do you think that Flying Start would benefit from the methodology? If not, can you provide evidence that Flying Start is achieving the improved outcomes that we have seen from the Leeds programme?

Moving to what's going on in our secondary schools, I agree that it is disappointing that the Government has rejected recommendation 8—for two hours of dedicated physical activity a week. It's not a huge amount, after all. I asked the secondary school where I'm a governor, and they are compliant in key stage 3, but by key stage 4 it's down to one hour because of the pressures of the curriculum. But, I think that is a really short-sighted decision, simply because, if they are not being active, their brains aren't going to be so active either. So, I think that a further hour of physical activity would actually improve their academic performance.

If we look at what happens after school, only 50 per cent of the year 7 pupils are doing any exercise outside school four times a week, and that falls to a third in year 11. So, I want to know what the Government is considering doing to open up all schools to be community-focused schools. I regard this as a public health emergency. Just as we have a climate change emergency, we also have a public health emergency. On that same note, how many schools have an active travel plan? Yet again today I saw pedestrians being pushed off the road by rat-runners delivering their children—their able-bodied child—to school by car. This is completely unacceptable, and also not in the best interests of the child, who is imbibing all the fumes that they get from the car.

There's a private school in my constituency that takes in pupils from three counties, and they have an active travel plan. Why can't all schools have an active travel plan? Where children have to be bussed into school because the school is 10 or 11 miles from where people live, stop the bus at least half a mile from the school and they can walk or run the last half mile. These are things that we need to do and we need to do them now because we have a major problem.