Can I apologise to the mover of the motion for missing the first few minutes of her speech? 

I sympathise with Helen Mary Jones describing her group as being between a rock and a hard place in dealing with this motion and amendments today. We looked at the Conservative motion and, in particular, point 3 b) requiring the Government to 

'apologise to pupils, parents and schools for letting them down'.

It certainly wasn't reaching out to find a consensus across the Chamber on this subject, but I understand that the day before the election. But, nonetheless, I thought the speech was very measured and thoughtful from Suzy, but there was a dichotomy with the motion, similarly in terms of the amendment. I'm not sure if Helen Mary was involved in moving the amendment, but her speech again diverged quite significantly from the amendment. She referred to the Government amendment as self-congratulatory and complacent, and I understand where she's coming from on that. Notwithstanding that, we thought the specifics of what it says are difficult to argue with. I think it is cherry-picking and putting their best foot forward, but what would you expect in general, let alone a day before election? It would certainly have been improved if it had included some of the suggestions that Helen Mary made.  

Nonetheless, we propose to support both the motion and the Government amendment. I'm not convinced to support the Plaid amendment, on which we'll abstain, because I don't know about the curriculum in terms of giving it such a following wind and agreement in advance; I think we'd like to keep our counsel on that. We're also not clear whether Plaid is suggesting that there should be direct funding of schools if there's going to be a Welsh Government guarantee. 

Similarly, I thought it was quite exciting to hear Oscar's contribution. I'm not sure whether he was intending to break new policy ground for the Conservatives the day before the general election, but it at least seemed to imply that there should be direct funding of schools. I wasn't clear whether he wanted Welsh Government to be doing that direct funding, or whether there might be a proposal for UK Government to step in and fund Welsh schools directly to ensure they get the amount of money he, and perhaps his group, state that they should. 

In the contribution we heard from Janet Finch-Saunders, while I always enjoy hearing from her, there was certainly a picking and choosing as to when to insist on statistical significance, and if we do want to use that concept, I suggest it should be used consistently, as opposed to cherry-picking for one's own convenience. 

As to the Minister, we spoke last week in some detail about the PISA results and I shan't reprise those comments, but what I will say is while I was relatively supportive of her and what the Government and schools had achieved, at least relevant to the previous set of results, when we spoke last week, I feel a little less charitable today, and that's partly because of the nature of the media coverage of the results. We spoke in the Chamber—there was one particular phrase she used, which was 'positive but not perfect', in promoting the results. And I felt to describe this as 'not perfect' understated how much of a problem we still have and how much more we need to improve. And it was that phrase that was clearly briefed out to all the media and was the main emphasis in terms of the coverage, and I felt that—