Thank you, Chair. You touched on this once or twice in answers to questions about how rigorous the qualification is. We've had mixed evidence, I would suggest, from groups of stakeholders. We've heard people say that the Welsh bac has no rigour, that pupils are spoon-fed. We've heard that the Welsh bac is passively marked, the grades are inflated, that there's little rigour in the sampling and moderation, there's a confusion about how the SCC is graded, and I know that's something you talked about, actually, that introducing the grading system is improving the rigour. I suppose my question to you is: if the Welsh bac is being seen in this way by stakeholders, how are going to address that? To what extent is that a real problem?
I think making it a graded qualification has been really important, and I make no apologies for this qualification being rigorous—no apologies for that at all. That's how it should be, and that's how you create value, by ensuring that a qualification is rigorous. What's really important is that it's not just me saying that it's rigorous; there is an independent process that benchmarks qualifications. The fact is that at advanced level—because I don't know if you're making these observations about the pre-16 Welsh bac, or whether we're talking about the advanced level qualification—that is the equivalent of an A-level. It's been benchmarked against A-levels. It has a UCAS tariff associated with it. It is used by universities as a means of qualification that gains entrance into a university in just the same way as an A-level is. So, therefore, I don't have any concerns about the rigour of the qualification. In terms of spoon-feeding, one of the reasons why universities like the qualification is that it's very difficult, for instance, in the individual project work to be spoon-fed. It is very demanding of individual students, and it's very difficult in a way. That's one of the reasons why it's valuable, isn't it, because it teaches a different set of skills? Because if you're doing a traditional, say, history A-level or a science A-level, there's a very strict syllabus and a course, there's a textbook and people are taught to that particular syllabus; with the Welsh bac, it is individual students that have to think, for instance, of their own individual project. You can't get those off a shelf, and you can't necessarily just find that information easily. There's real skill involved in being able to do that well and get graded well for that. So, I do not have concerns about the rigour. I do have concerns about some of the feedback by Qualifications Wales about the onerousness of the evaluation and what that means for teacher workload, which is one of the things that Qualifications Wales is looking at. But in terms of rigour and people being spoon-fed, then I don't share those concerns.
Okay, because those were concerns, in the main, that were articulated by people delivering the Welsh bac—by teachers. So, I suppose the question then comes back to some of the other points that were being raised about the consistency, because that may well be from those teachers in schools where they're not taking the bac as seriously as some others are.
And, of course, there would be—. There is a professional responsibility for those teachers delivering that qualification to ensure that the ethos of that qualification and the skills—. It would potentially be a disservice to students if that qualification was being delivered in that way.