Thank you, Llywydd. I call upon members to support amendments 12 and 13, which introduce new mandatory initial and ongoing conditions of registration regarding the effectiveness of tertiary education providers' arrangements for supporting and promoting the welfare of their staff and students. This will ensure that consideration is given to whether providers have proper processes, services and policies in place to support the welfare, well-being and safety of students and staff.

Everyone has the right to a happy education experience, and I want Wales to build a reputation, within the UK and internationally, for putting well-being at the centre of our education system. A lack of support for mental health and well-being can be a critical barrier to success in education for many learners and students. It is therefore vital that we ensure that providers are attentive to addressing these challenges and are supported to do so by the commission. It's clear that we face many challenges across the UK. Full-time students are more likely to experience sexual assaults than those in any other occupational group, and nearly a quarter of ethnic minority students experience racial harassment on campus. Students continually report lower levels of happiness and higher levels of anxiety than the general population, and this has been exacerbated by the recent effects of the pandemic.

Over the past decade there has been a reckoning, particularly within the UK higher education sector, about how providers address matters of bullying and harassment and how they support students' well-being and mental health, and I think that we would all agree that more progress is needed on these issues. A Universities UK report in 2015 recommended sweeping changes to the ways in which universities manage reporting and support for victims of harassment, violence and hate crime, and I think that we would all agree that more progress needs to be made on this. In England, the Office for Students does not formally regulate the way in which higher education providers promote and support student welfare. We will therefore be going further in Wales by ensuring that the new commission is empowered to prioritise the oversight of these vitally important matters.

I hope that these amendments will command cross-party support. I want to thank Laura Anne Jones for tabling amendments at Stage 2 that highlighted the importance of ensuring that mental health and well-being were reflected in this piece of legislation. I believe that the amendments tabled here at Stage 3 will offer the most effective way of ensuring that the commission promotes the mental health and well-being of learners. I cannot support amendments 98, 99 and 100. As I stated when these were proposed during Stage 2 consideration, the commission has to retain the ability to modify learner protection plans so as to ensure that those plans are robust and remain focused on the learner. I call on Members, therefore, to support amendments 12 and 13 and to reject all other amendments in this group.