Thank you to Siân Gwenllian for those further questions. I share with her the memory of reading a book that I had when I was at school, and I remember developing a delight for learning in the classroom of Miss Annie Derrick in Pontarddulais school when I was a young boy. So, these things stay long in the mind. But, of course, as the Member says, this isn’t an experience that everyone shares, because it’s something that should be encouraged at home, and not everyone has the same access to the same resources and support. This is a contribution in that direction. The plan tries to get to grips with some of the issues that you talked about—the attainment gap and the emphasis on supporting those who need the most support in order to make progress.

In terms of the specific questions, in terms of the toolkit, this is one of the range of elements of support in terms of professional development that we have been working on with Estyn and the internal team within the Welsh Government. We’ve been working with the consortia too to ensure that the good practice that is already available is being shared in a more widespread way in terms of the resources available to our teachers. So, the toolkit is an element of that and will support teachers to develop their teaching skills in this specific area.

In terms of emphasising and encouraging people to read more at home, in the past 18 months of course the relationship between the schools and parents and carers has changed, and in several ways, it has strengthened as schools have responded to the COVID challenges. There will be a significant public campaign taking place at the end of this year to encourage parents, carers and guardians to speak to their children, to read to their children. We’ll outline the benefits of that and we’ll try to ensure that the messages that are part of that national publicity campaign will outline the advantages of doing just that and will encourage parents of all backgrounds to spend that time with their children.

The Member asked an important question in terms of phonics. Phonics is one element of a suite of options available to teachers. It is an important part of that other toolkit in terms of the steps that we can take, but we must also ensure that learning vocabulary and comprehension happen at the same time. But I want to ensure that we look at the evidence in this regard, that we set out that context too, for our teachers, so that they have that context in order to make the choices that they need to make. That’s why I mentioned in the statement that we intend to look at the evidence from that way of teaching oracy and we will ensure that we implement the best practice in our new curriculum.

Other parts of the United Kingdom, England specifically, hold an annual test for phonics for students; I don’t think that’s the right way ahead. We are trying to move in our curriculum away from that kind of test that demonstrates a snapshot, if you will. We, of course, have personalised assessments, online assessments, for reading already. Those are available already in ways that are flexible for teachers to be able to hold those assessments during the year, and that demonstrates to the pupil, to the teachers, to the parents and to the guardians the development of the learners in terms of reading and comprehension. That is part of the ethos of the new curriculum to provide an opportunity—that assessments are part of the learning process. So, that's a different aspect of the way that we look at things here in Wales.

The final question that the Member asked was with regard to growing the education workforce. And this, of course, is a priority for us, as we have discussed jointly here in the Siambr already, in terms of teachers, of course, but also in terms of classroom assistants, to ensure that we have a workforce that speaks Welsh in all parts of the workforce. That's important, too. We are working on a draft plan at the moment; we are preparing that to share with stakeholders. We have had discussions with various stakeholders already, including the Education Workforce Council and others, but we need to have further discussions with other stakeholders, which includes the commissioner and a range of other stakeholders. This is something that we have to make urgent progress on, but we can only do that through collaboration with the other partners that we have in the education system.