It's very good to know that Flying Start teams are required to have other strategies for engaging with families and are expected to outline these as part of their annual plans, and I think that's a very important thing. But, unfortunately, you also say in your response that Flying Start itself is going to be using more social media platforms to communicate key messages to Flying Start families, and that's fine for some, but I fear that it won't reach the most disadvantaged. 

Turning to the Welsh Government's childcare offer, originally it was focused only on families where both parents—or, in a single-parent household, that parent—are working over 16 hours a week. So, we very much welcome the extension to parents who are in education, training or on the edge of work, and particularly your acceptance of our recommendation that children's rights impact assessments and equality impact assessments need to be carried out and that they will be published at least a month before any changes in the provision are going to be going live.

I hope that that will assist all public authorities to address how, for example, people who are working atypical hours, such as shift workers, are going to be able to benefit from the childcare offer, because this largely low-paid section of the workforce have largely been excluded from benefitting from the childcare offer as the market has yet to provide for this level of complexity. You've put the onus on local authorities to address this as part of their childcare sufficiency assessments, and I've no doubt the committee will look with great interest at the detail of those in due course to see whether they really address that particular concern.

During our inquiry, we heard from experts in Scotland and Sweden, and it's really important that we all learn from the best as a way of driving up the quality of our provision and our standards across the sector, so that it is not just a programme for getting more parents back into work more quickly, but a crucial vehicle for narrowing the attainment gap.

The Welsh Government, and the Deputy Minister in particular, hugely value the learning through play curriculum for early years and key stage 1, but I feel that nowhere are the pedagogical skills more important than in the very early years. This is the most difficult group of children to teach, and therefore we need the very best teachers in this field. So, we're very pleased that the Government has accepted our recommendation about the crucial role that community-focused schools can play, improving the consistency and quality of the provision across the childcare sector. 

It is terribly confusing for the child who at the moment has to be carted between up to three separate locations to cover the hours that their parent works, and parents themselves who took part in our consultations expressed confusion about the difference between early education and childcare. It seems to me that community-focused schools can really make a difference in ensuring that the whole community of offer is all good.

And I think there's quite a lot of cultural change that needs to go on as a result of this, because the National Association of Head Teachers tweeted that childcare should be kept out of schools in response to our report, which was a truly astonishing disregard for the role that quality, comprehensive childcare plays in narrowing the gap in attainment caused by poverty. They cannot be surprised that children turn up in school aged three with only three or four words if they don't pay attention to what childcare they're getting before they start mainstream school. 

This is definitely not about schools taking over the valued role played by the private and the community nurseries, but I would be grateful if the Deputy Minister in her response could clarify how we are going to raise the capacity and capability of the whole of the childcare sector, which is largely dominated by these private and voluntary organisations, and that's particularly important when it comes to additional learning needs.

We had a really harrowing piece of evidence from somebody whose autistic child was simply not able to get any support at all during the time of lockdown because the key workers were told that the provision needed to close, and it seems to me that that sort of person, that sort of family needs, above all, to have been given much greater consideration. So, I think that it would be really helpful to hear a little bit more about how we're going to do that, because for a family with a disabled child, they don't want to be carting their child across some distance in order to be able to get the level of provision that child requires. We need that child to be able to get the same provision as the other children who they're playing with in daily life and not have to go somewhere special. They need to be integrated from the start.

I'd be grateful if you could tell us what progress has been made in taking forward the joint working by Estyn and Care Inspectorate Wales on the childcare provision and whether there's a greater role for Estyn in really ensuring that all childcare provision has the support of suitably qualified people in designing the curriculum, particularly for children with additional needs.

And lastly, I just want to say that we need a childcare sector that reflects the population. So, there's a great deal more work to do to ensure that people from different communities are encouraged to take up this important job in childcare, and the way in which we reward our workforce and show that we value this important work is something that we really all need to address, because, as one of our contributors said,

'We're on zero hour contracts and we're minding the future.'

So, pay and professionalisation of the sector are key to the child-focused and family-focused society we all seek.