It pretty much sounds like a market to me, Deputy Presiding Officer, and that’s fine. The Member is perfectly entitled to have those values underpinning his approach to education policy. That’s absolutely fine. The reality of living in our country, Mark—the reality of living in this country—is that, actually, children don’t have the ability to move around—[Interruption.] The reality is that we need every school to be a good local school and not to be able to have a situation where parents who can afford to move into the right catchment areas are able to do so. All schools need to be good schools regardless of where they are. And we do not move schools forward by setting them against each other.

At the heart is robust and continuous self-evaluation for all tiers of the education system and not teachers holding their arms around what’s good practice in their school. We need to break that open and share that good practice, and you don’t do it if you create a market system where schools compete against each other, and there is self-interest in not sharing that good practice.

Now, we also need to use these targets, along with professional dialogue, to support learning and improvement, embed collaboration, as I’ve just said, build trust in our profession, drive self-improvement and raise standards for all of our learners. Outside accountability will continue to be a feature of our system, but we will provide greater autonomy for schools to self-improve and develop genuine targets that contribute to raising the quality of education in schools and the standards of their learners’ achievements specific to their needs in their schools.

The requirement for schools' governing bodies to set performance- measure targets at key stage 4 will be removed in favour of increasing the number of non-specific targets that must be set, based on schools’ evaluation. So, actually, we’re asking them to set more targets than they’re actually setting at the moment, but they will have the autonomy to reflect on their own performance and judge where they need to make the improvement. Our plans are about making sure that the way in which we assess schools’ performance represents performance of the school in the round and more trust will be given to our educational professionals who are there, day in, day out, in our classrooms and those who lead our schools to identify the matters that mean the most to them in their local context.

I ask Members to vote against the motion today and not take a step back on an important, practical step in helping to bring about the cultural change that I believe is ultimately needed within our schools and will be needed to deliver on our national mission. I take the point that Suzy Davies makes about procedure. I’m very happy to reflect on the way in which we undertake those procedures in the context of the department for education, and I’m sure that colleagues in wider Government will reflect on the points that have been made today. The procedure has not been there to avoid scrutiny, but I shall reflect on that with any other further legislation or regulations that we bring forward in the education department.