As it stands, we cannot support the curriculum Bill. If the Bill continues to remove the rights of parents as primary educators, I cannot, in all good conscience, vote to support its introduction, regardless of any other improvements it brings to education in Wales.

The compulsory teaching of RSE, or relationships and sexuality education, and RVE, or religion, values and ethics, is derisory and has been rejected by the public in not one, but two public consultations. Yet, despite the lack of support, the Welsh Government have removed the rights of parents to withdraw their children from RSE and RVE lessons, and they are, in effect, telling parents that the state knows their children better than they do themselves. But, according to the House of Lords judgment in Regina v. Secretary of State for Education and Employment, the child is not the child of the state and it is important, in a free society, that parents should be allowed a large measure of autonomy in the way they discharge their parental responsibilities. The Welsh Government, however, are clearly prepared to ignore that judgment, just as they are prepared to ride roughshod over the views of the parents who have twice rejected the Welsh Government removal of the parental opt-out.

This is a topic that parents up and down this nation feel extremely strongly about, and I've had more correspondence urging me to reject this Bill than I have had on any other piece of legislation. And some parents and grandparents have spoken to me regarding what is currently being taught to their children, and some do not think that the content of the lesson for a child of eight, as was told to me, was at all appropriate.

So, why do parents feel so strongly on this? Why do religious groups and secular groups share the same opinion on maintaining the opt-out? Because some say, they have stated, that they have seen the sorts of lessons that will be taught under the new curriculum.