But, in looking at the aims of that AoLE and looking at the Scottish equivalent as well, the commitment to our children acquiring facility with other languages in any way that can be comparable to the language that they grow up with—it's still quite difficult to identify. I'm not saying it's not there, but I'm struggling to see it.

With more autonomy, of course, some schools will have space and freedom to raise the place of modern foreign languages in their schools as communication skills, as well as more formal, focused learning. But others will use it to let it slide to the minimum acceptable level, because let's remember only 17 per cent of school leaders give positive messages on learning modern foreign languages. If we're to save them, I think we need an additional step, which is a step of accountability. Minister, I do understand your motives for changing what accountability looks like, and yes, I agree with you, it needs to be meaningful. In looking at the new curriculum as a new opportunity for modern foreign languages, I hope that you'll be looking not just at how schools teach modern foreign languages and to how many people, but at how schools use modern foreign languages, and I'm wondering whether this might be built into the work of Estyn, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the programme of international student assessment, if that's relevant, and I don't know how how that works, to be honest, but certainly the internal accountability requirements. It's already my ask for raising our very youngest in two national languages, and I can't really see why the same principle of using language, not just learning about it, can't be applied to a third language as well.

So, I'll be looking again at the research on the best times in a child's development for language acquisition, but I'm hoping you can help me out here, Minister. For, while I recognise that all our children—and I mean all of them—are increasingly at risk of poorer oral language transfer in an era where all ages are glued to the screen, and that some children will have delayed speech and understanding development for a range of the reasons, we still seem to be missing that sweet spot of maximum absorption, of maximum acquisition of more than one language. So, I'm suggesting—at least, I think I am at the moment—that the modern foreign-language element of this languages, literacy and communication AoLE really needs to bite much earlier than perhaps we're seeing at the moment. So, I'd like to hear a bit more about why opportunities in the current foundation phase haven't really been picked up to date, because we'll all know of examples of individual schools where the school leaders really run with this, and the evidence there that, in those cases where there's collaboration between primary and secondary schools, the primary-age children carry that culture of languages with them into year 7. So, I think we really do need to get at the heart of why more primary schools haven't really grasped this opportunity, because that'll give us insight into how to raise the importance of this life skill in local curricula and help us hold schools to account in a meaningful way about the success or otherwise in helping young people be at least confident, and, even better, competent in three languages.

So, why does this matter for Wales? Well, I think there are reasons that we'll all embrace, regardless of our political priorities. We learn language in different ways at different times in our lives and use different parts of the brain. The cognitive effects of this and the honing of different types of learning skill are now well documented and confirmed over convincing periods of review and study, not just for schoolchildren, but for those at risk of dementia and other cognition loss as well. Now, of course, that's not to say that speaking a number of languages would have made me any better as a footballer at school—well, I don't think it would make me a better footballer at all. The reason I actually have a Latin O-level is because it was an alternative to doing hockey. [Laughter.] But it could have helped me with different thinking and learning skills, which would have helped me coach or manage a side, empathise with or motivate and discipline a team, strategise better, understand the finances of a club better, and, increasingly, it seems to me, communicate with the human beings in that team in their own languages, making them comfortable, connected with, included, part of something bigger and committed to participating in something that impacts on the success of others—exactly the type of result we want from a successful manifestation of the new curriculum, and there it is encapsulated in the learning of how to communicate in more than one language.

But I am a Conservative, and so I will finish on some points about the economy. More participants in a prosperous economy can help improve investment in public services whilst reducing dependence on them, so this really does matter, and everything we say about how multilingualism helps with the understanding of others, about enjoying and learning from different cultures, becoming citizens of the world as well as our own cynefin, yes, these are ends in themselves, but they're also completely applicable to helping Wales prosper economically.

I was listening yesterday, actually, to the session on international trade and your, as a multilingual person yourself, Minister, worries about the America first policy, leaving the single market and so forth. It is a big world out there; we have to use what we have to get the most out of it. And so that doesn't just mean exporting more manufactured goods that people want; it's about finding a way to make sure that it's our goods that people want in a highly competitive, increasingly standardised product market. And that's about relationships. It's about communication.

If we want our hospitality and visitor industry to grow, not just in terms of visitors, but also in terms of status, which will make the industry attractive to our brightest and most enterprising people, then making it clear that particular skills in more than one language are a massive asset is something that we've got to get across. Again, relationships build businesses, especially in our service industries, especially in the types of businesses that we already have in Wales. Because this isn't all about multinationals or the types of factory branches that Mike Hedges was talking about yesterday. Multilingualism has fostered trade and the exchange of ideas since ancient times and Britain's push for fresh markets outside the European Union is likely to lead to new language needs. Companies responding to this challenge will depend on a multilingual skills pool for cross-border trade.

Many British people claim that they are bad at speaking languages other than English. Current UK Government stats show that the UK already loses about 3.5 per cent of its GDP every year as a result of a lack of language skills in the workforce. An EU study found that, while businesses perceive the ability to speak English as indispensable, in truth English accounted for only 29 per cent of their future total demand for foreign language skills. It was the willingness to use languages that mattered to the trade contacts, which gave businesses the advantage in those product markets where really there wasn't really much to choose between one country's product and other. And that same report also showed that 945,000 SMEs in Europe were losing trade because of a lack of language competence. 

Wales is an SME economy. It's an economy that's becoming more familiar with the benefits of its linguistic agility, with its own official languages, and, even viewing this through the lens of the foundation and circular economies, the local economy doesn't benefit if the local plumber or the local butcher or the local cleaning firm can't offer services to the local hotel because that hotel is closed because it couldn't compete with chains with slick multilingual staff whose business and leisure clients felt more valued and comfortable as a result.

Just to finish, and I'm hoping, Deputy Llywydd, that you will give me time for a couple of other speakers—