Can I thank you, Lynne? I don't think Welsh Government should have been particularly surprised at the content of this report. Per-pupil funding for schools has been historically poor compared to the rest of the UK, and the chickens have finally come home to roost. Teachers, school leaders, unions like the NAHT and council leaders have been genuinely fearful about the vulnerability of schools to crumbling finances, and I thank them all for coming before the committee to give us their evidence. And as well as their worries about the overall amount available to schools, teachers and school leaders have been extremely alert to that visible disparity between councils and the invisibility of why those disparities are there.

Despite the long-standing pupil funding gap, Welsh Conservatives signed up to this report because we thought there was an issue regarding UK Government funding. Even though we could have pushed the obvious point of the Welsh Government choosing how it prioritises its spending, and the extra money per head provided by the funding floor, some of these concerns are UK-wide, so fixing the problem had to lie partly with London. But London has responded. As a result of the shrinking national deficit, the UK Government has committed £7.1 billion to schools over the next three years. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says that this will restore the value of the pot of money for schools to where it was before the effects of the financial crash bit. This means about £355 million extra coming to Wales from the UK schools budget—and that is the schools budget, not the education budget—over the next three years. The Minister now has the clarity to allow for multi-year commitment, as she asked for in accepting recommendation 15.

The £195 million for Wales coming from the UK schools budget for 2020-1 as a result of this year's spending review—we heard from the Trefnydd a couple of weeks ago that the decision has not been made on how that money is going to be spent. I hope we find out that that's allocated soon, because in the last three years the pupil funding gap between Wales and England has noticeably narrowed—the NASUWT says it's £645; Welsh Government says not. But narrowed it has, because the number of pupils in England has grown considerably over the last few years and funding there has not caught up. In Wales we've had only 29 extra pupils in that 10 years, but the long-standing funding gap—and let's remember it's been as much as £800—is still there, despite the funding floor.

The gap has been the result of long-term budget decisions made by Welsh Government, not the UK Government. It predates and arises from different reasons from those affecting schools in England, and unlike Welsh Government, the UK Government has acted relatively swiftly, reversing the real-term cuts that have affected the value of that school funding pie. So, the question now is, now that this extra money is coming on-stream, whether we see the per-pupil funding gap open up again. Because if it does, it will be completely clear that this is a choice made in Cardiff Bay, not one in London.