'nothing that you say here in this Chamber today can make me feel personally any worse about these results.'

So, I'm assuming that you're allowing yourself a small sigh of relief today, but are still very, very conscious of the fact that this is no reprieve. I recognise, as do your officials, that there has been an improvement, and I also want to thank the teachers and students for their efforts in doing that. But do your officials recognise also that these have not been significant improvements?

My contest is not with the teachers and the young people who have taken part in these tests. It's with you as a Government and the hopes that you've raised, based on the last three years of reform, that continue to be dashed. So, yes, while we acknowledge the modest but not significant improvements, they still leave Wales the poorest performing nation in the UK. Our results, in effect, are slightly less bad than they were. It reinforces quite how high the mountain is that we have to climb to reach our UK fellows, let alone some of those in other countries.

We are still missing that target of 500, confirmed just a fortnight ago by the First Minister. We are still below the average in some of the areas that are being examined, although, as we know, the OECD average itself has fallen, and being average is not what we should be achieving anyway. Catching up with the pack, which is going backwards, is not really winning the race. We need to be doing more than keeping pace. We need to be stepping it up.

So, my first question on the statement, and I'm sure that there will be loads, is: you said three years ago that you would look at other countries to see what they do well and to get their good ideas. Even at that point, we were a little bit worried about Scotland because of its obvious influence on the reforms that you were bringing in. Obviously, they've had a good result on reading this time around. Despite that, their scores have remained depressed since the Donaldson era, and even the reading score today doesn't take them back to before that. So, can you tell us what it is that you are still learning from the Scottish experience and their woes, and what you will also be learning from the English experience? Obviously, their scores, as we heard from Mark Reckless earlier, are considerably better and are improving.

Can you just give us a little bit of information about where you think the improvements have actually come from? In 2016 you quite rightly acknowledged—and you've mentioned it today—that our more able and talented children were underperforming. I think that all of us would be uncomfortable if that played any part at all in the position we had in the attainment gap. Specifically, have the changes affected the top half—the seventy-fifth percentile, if I can call it that—as compared to the ninetieth percentile?

You mentioned the Seren programme, and I'd like to hear a little bit more about that. But the reason I'm asking this question is this: while our A* GCSE standards this year were very high—and the First Minister mentioned that earlier—our A* to C grades are down this year across these subjects. This is the same cohort of young people who sat the PISA tests the year before they sat these GCSEs. As you acknowledged, these GCSEs are now more aligned with the skills that PISA is designed to tease out, and your reforms have been in place in informing those exams for some time now. So, why are marginally better PISA results reflected in a drop in A* to C GCSE attainment?

We spoke in this Chamber some weeks ago now about the drop in achievement at the moment across years 7 to 9. It was in the context, if you remember, of the removal of the requirement of school governors to set targets for the purpose of pupil improvement on school leaders in English or Welsh and maths and science. This year's year 7s will be the next cohort of PISA test children. So, do you now worry that the current trajectory for those year 7 to 9s means that adults and children involved in that current education system haven't really grasped the delivery of these reforms? And do you regret now that the removal of these targets for overall pupil achievement in those key subjects may indeed present us with a picture in a few years' time that we'll all be pretty unhappy with?

Earlier, listening to your response to Mark Reckless on the issue of schools not having enough resources, I noticed you were nodding vigorously when he was talking to you, and, obviously, you've mentioned Estonia here today. Whatever you can say to us about the education system and the spending that goes into it, it still remains the case that schools—specifically schools—are not getting enough money, and I'm wondering if you're able to give us some comfort on that today.

I wonder what your observations are that, while reading scores have improved, there is still the serious OECD concern over understanding. So, even though the love of reading is still a bit of a challenge in and of itself, this issue of understanding—'comprehension', as we used to call it in the olden days—is still of considerable concern, I would say, because if you can't understand what you're reading, the ability to actually move into the area of critical thinking is seriously compromised, and of course this is the whole purpose behind what PISA is testing and what our own exams are working towards. That's the direction we're going in, and if there's an issue over comprehension, then we're obviously going to fail.

Then, finally—because I appreciate, obviously, that there will be questions coming from others—it's basically this: how can it be that our scores in these areas are still lower than they were in 2006, when Wales decided to participate? Yours aren't the first reforms, Minister, and even with them, we are still further back than when we started: bottom of the UK, targets being missed, thousands of children still behind their cousins across the world when they don't need to be. So, my final question is this: what guarantee will you give us that in 2021 we will be above this average, that we will hit your target of 500—effectively, when will we be where you want us to be? Thank you.