Diolch yn fawr, Llywydd. Thank you very much. I'd like to give a minute each to Mike Hedges and Laura Jones.

Two weeks ago, I was eager to join the Minister and others at the Universities Wales civic mission showcase, and I'm pretty sure, Minister, in your response, you'll agree that it was a little oasis of nourishment and positivity when so many of us have been bound up in the challenges of COVID. And the highlight for me was hearing about two mentoring projects: one was the physics mentoring project, which places trained undergraduate and postgraduate students into secondary schools across Wales, to mentor year 10 and 11 students, promote physics qualifications and inspire future physicists; but the other was an established successful award-winning modern foreign languages mentoring scheme, which is also a collaboration between a number of our universities, and it's that I want to draw to Members' attention today.

Now, some of you will know that the Welsh Conservatives have had a long-standing commitment to creating a trilingual Wales, introducing a third language to children in primary school alongside our two national languages. And the scheme that I'll be talking about this afternoon supports the ambition of what we had in mind, but it's really helped me better understand how that might be better achieved. It also supports the new curriculum in its ambition of capturing children's attention and drawing them into the world of wonders that is the world of languages, and I'm very interested to see how this is going to play out. Because there's no doubt in my mind that living in an anglophone country has virtually extinguished curiosity in that world of wonders over the years, and it leaves us all the poorer for it. And, yes, you'll say, 'We're lucky, we're not just anglophone, we live in a part of the UK where more and more of our children are lucky enough to have two languages—two national languages'. Some of our citizens, of course, have more than two.

We are told often enough that being bilingual makes you better at other languages, and I'm going to be controversial and I'm going to dispute that. And I'll dispute it because my own bilingual children never bonded with their French lessons in school. It may well be a more accurate observation if we actively learned our other national language, but there's no great uptake of international languages in Welsh-medium schools, which may include, of course, many learners from non-Welsh-speaking backgrounds also. And I'll dispute it because we no longer explore and learn how our mother tongues work, and it strikes me that we acquire other languages in different ways, depending on our individual preferences for learning, and I guess it's a mixture of approaches for us all.

Welsh is my second language, and it's far from perfect, but I've learnt it by being exposed to it quite frequently, not least, actually, by being in this Senedd. However, I think I've been able to learn it like that, in a sort of low-level immersion way, because I've been versed in an old style of grammar rules and structures, that kind of learning, not just to three other languages at school but my first language as well. And I know that sounds a bit grim, but, actually, we didn't just sit at our desks being grilled in conjugations and declensions. I can still sing you that Latin pop song we composed, if you want me to. Or, I can enthrall you with the magic realism of my story of Mozart the hippopotamus, thrown together because I had all the vocabulary for a zoo but none for the life of the famous composer.