Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:01 pm on 3 December 2019.
I thank Mark Reckless for those additional questions. I think, as the education Minister has said, whenever she's been asked about this already today, and will have another opportunity on the floor of the Assembly, we've never suggested that these results are perfect. They are positive, and there are issues, in the reading domain particularly, that we will want to take up as a result of these scores and to see what we can do to improve them still further in the next round of PISA results.
In relation to resources, the Welsh Government is putting a major investment of £50 million into improving IT in the classroom. Of course, I would expect teachers and headteachers to say that if they had more resources, they could do better. But that is a major investment.
If you look at any international survey of reported well-being amongst young people in the United Kingdom, we come in the bottom half of the league table. That is a matter we should be concerned about, but it also, in some ways, reflects the way in which some of the questions in this test are phrased to get the raw material from which the answers are derived.
If I was looking for something positive in the results that you could say to those young people, then I would point to the fact that the disadvantage gap in Wales is significantly smaller than across the OECD and that young people in Wales are better able to overcome disadvantage as a result of the education that they receive in Wales than would be true over the OECD as a whole. So, a young person who comes into our school with a disadvantage gap is more likely to overcome that gap in Wales than across the OECD as a whole. I think that sort of positive message and that positive investment that our education service makes in young people, I hope makes its contribution, along with many other things, to trying to convey a message to those young people about their importance to us, about the value we attach to them and about how their well-being, as well as everything else they achieve, matters in their lives and to Welsh people as a whole.