The recommendations on diversity in the report, which are entirely justified, and I'm very glad that the Minister's accepted those, have a wider resonance about where we fit into our own lives as well as our place in the universe, if you like—questions that are reflected in religions all round the world. But even in a secular environment such as ours, I'm sure we'll all have spent a minute or two in recent times asking those questions about, 'Am I Welsh? Am I British? Am I European?'

I think it's also fair to say that school is not the be-all and end-all for our understanding of history. It really is the epitome of lifelong learning, and we can even give a bit of a hat tip to all those film and tv producers and writers of historic fiction, including those in Wales, who recognise the high drama of our stories, be they local or global, and who capture our attention—critical to learning—and keep us interested. Never mind the accuracy, make it relatable, show the agency of human beings.

I don't think Macmillan was quite right when he complained of, 'Events, dear boy, events.' I think history is built on decisions; usually the decisions of others and, very often of course, the decisions of men. But we can have another debate about that.

This new curriculum has the potential to treat the study of history as a means of understanding and examining human nature in every bit as good a way as the study of literature. I don't think Welsh history should be confined to discrete lessons, either. But history isn't just a source of material for humanities left to teachers to extract interesting events from Welsh history just to illustrate other anthropological points. I think we already hear that too many of our schools are relying on teachers who teach classes outside their specialism, and we've agreed that this isn't the best experience for our pupils to have. Now we're asking our teachers to embrace an expanse of knowledge and experience to express the curriculum through lessons that may still be called history or maths and ensure that pupils still get enough subject knowledge to demonstrate some depth and expertise in order to pursue further study, training or work in particular fields.

Young people are still going to want qualifications at the end of compulsory education, and those exams or other assessments will still have to be quality assured and comparable with our nearest equivalents inside and outside the UK. With exams comes the issue of specification, and that implies a need for some element of prescription—that silver thread that David was talking about—to ensure that specifications are met.

This is not an exhortation to teach to the exam. I recognise and understand why the Minister has rejected recommendation 2, but I ask her and the committee, even, to consider this illustration of the challenge. This is going to be a bit of a mam brag, so apologies for that and the likely outcome of this being completely hands-off. So, my son, right? He is a recent modern history graduate with a first from a Russell Group university. That's my proud mam face. But he did his compulsory education through the medium of Welsh in a school in the town that is the home of the Owain Glyndŵr parliament, and he loved his history teacher. He studied barely any Welsh history, or even a Welsh dimension to the British history that he did do, because there was no requirement to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of Welsh history in his compulsory education. And that is very different from my own schooldays, incidentally, although even now I ask myself what I did actually learn about my cynefin.

The Minister will say that the Estyn review and the new curriculum will meet that challenge, but with the current workforce familiar with the existing, very narrow history curriculum that has squeezed out Welsh history, how can we guard against three risks?

The first is this: who would blame the current workforce, who may have little experience of teaching Welsh history, let alone in this radically different pedagogical environment, for seeking the easiest route possible to reach an acceptable minimum but no more? There is little point in having resources, as per recommendation 6, if teachers have no time to make the most of those resources, however talented and adaptable they may be.

The second is that our new teachers will have acquired these pedagogic skills that are more cross-cutting to achieve the aims that we are reminded of in the Minister's response to recommendation 7, but who are less specialist in the area of knowledge, despite her hopes to the contrary set out in that same response. You can only fit so much into one year's PGCE study, after all.

Third and finally, Dirprwy Lywydd. The third is that Welsh history could be seen as a fix for this local identity of the curriculum, and will find itself expressed in coursework and experiential learning rather than also being considered as an appropriate subject for the academic testing element, which must be a component of GCSEs or their successors, which will still matter for the reasons I gave earlier, and I don't think any of us would want that. Thank you.