Firstly, I am pleased to announce an additional £5 million in funding for reading programmes across Wales, which will provide a book for every learner alongside a targeted scheme of reading support, focusing on early years and disadvantaged learners. The programme will ensure that every single child and young person in Wales has a book of their own to keep. It will also include the provision of 72,000 additional books to reception children at schools across Wales, 3,600 letterbox club packs for looked-after children, books and training for practitioners to support learning, and a box of 50 books to every state school in Wales. This additional funding will help children, regardless of background, to develop those early speech, language and communication skills and demonstrate the life-changing impact that books and reading can have. The funding reflects the importance of Wales as a bilingual nation and supports learners to communicate in both languages in everyday life. 

We must also support our workforce. Initial teacher education and ongoing professional learning are critical to forming and continuing to improve all practitioners’ practice in this area. Working with teacher education providers and consortia over the coming months, we’ll instigate a review of current provision to ensure practitioners continue to get the high quality, easily accessible support that they need across Wales. Building on Estyn reports and research evidence, we'll work with our regional partners to maintain and improve attitudes to and engagement with reading. Estyn will continue to provide examples of effective practice in teaching reading at a whole-school level and developing a culture of reading. And we’ll look to the impact of our interventions so we can improve as a system and support children and young people’s engagement and attainment in reading and oracy.

The curriculum for Wales guidance is clear that the systematic and consistent teaching of phonics must be a key part of the toolkit in our schools, at a stage that is developmentally appropriate for the learner. We would encourage schools to adopt such an approach alongside vocabulary building and comprehension to ensure learners are able to understand and make sense of what they read and become fluent and effective readers. All teaching must be based on evidence of what we know works, and I therefore intend to clarify and strengthen our approach in this area. I recently established a national network, a practitioner-led body, open to all schools, which will support the implementation of the new curriculum. I can confirm that our national network will prioritise oracy and reading in the spring. We'll work with experts and practitioners to look at the role of phonics in the new curriculum so that we can provide the best support and guidance for the teaching of reading.

In 2016, the 'National Literacy and Numeracy Programme—a strategic action plan' set out the vision for literacy and numeracy as we moved towards the new curriculum. To build on this, through the national network, we’ll work with practitioners to understand what’s working, reflecting on pedagogy, examples of good practice and communications, as well as what we need to improve. We'll also look at the continued role of the literacy and numeracy framework in supporting the progression of these skills and the need for additional resources and materials. This will help provide the resources, support and expertise needed to facilitate high-quality teaching of oracy and reading. I'm interested in what more we can be doing to share good practice in our early years and foundation phase. With that in mind, it's our intention to work with practitioners and experts over the coming months to develop a toolkit that will help empower teachers to develop their classroom practice that meets the needs of their learners.

We know that, through shared reading experiences, we can encourage a love of books and stories from an early age. This is particularly critical for our youngest children, where the building blocks for early language development begin with developing their attention, listening and understanding skills. The work that is under way on our Talk with Me programme highlights the importance of early language development and the parental role in supporting this. We've recently commissioned a review of language screening tools, undertaken by Cardiff Metropolitan University and the Bristol Speech and Language Therapy Research Unit, and the review will consider how practitioners can be supported in identifying issues in terms of listening, understanding and speaking skills. I expect the report of the review to be shared with me in the coming weeks. But we can and must do more, and we are exploring what more we can do to provide further opportunities to support parents, so that their children can have regular opportunities to engage with rich reading materials and participate in stories, songs and rhymes.

Dirprwy Lywydd, every learner must have the chance to reach their potential, and today I've set out some of the measures we intend to take over coming months to support our learners. As the work escalates, I will endeavour to keep Members updated on the progress that we are making.