We know, and we are constantly told—I'm sure this is commonplace in constituency surgeries, as well—by parents who say that the biggest mitigating factor for them, actually, either going into work at an earlier opportunity or expanding their hours is purely the cost of childcare in front of them. We are picking up, even from the early term of the analysis—. I think our further reports, both Arad and as we go forward with the pilots, will substantiate this more. It'll go beyond the anecdotal, it will show that parents are having an enhanced opportunity to balance their work life, to make better choices, either in terms of expanding the number of hours they're working and increasing their disposable income within their families, or actually making it simply better for them in their family situation, where they don't currently have that offer. So, I get the fact that we have one report out there, but it's one report. It's a report, and we're not dismissing it entirely, but what we are saying is: we are now working with real-life piloting of an offer, and we are seeing the benefits coming through. As we roll this out, we'll be back in front of this committee saying, 'Well, this is now what we're finding. We can go beyond the real-life stories that I'm relating to you now, and we can say, "Well, here's some hard data that goes with this, as well."'
Okay. You reference in your paper, as well, another report, which is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report, 'Starting Strong 2017', and it highlights countries that have, maybe, the most similar childcare offer to what's being proposed here in Wales. I'm just wondering what assessment you've made of those similarities, because, clearly, there'll be different economic contexts in different countries and different levels of public expenditure, et cetera.
We haven't done really detailed analysis of comparisons with other countries far from Wales, but we will be doing work that will be doing some benchmarking against, where we can find similar models, where appropriate—do some appropriate benchmarking. What we have been doing is looking at what's been happening across the border in England and trying to learn from the lessons there, and also the offer in Scotland as well, which are both close to hand. They're in quite similar contexts. But we will do some work, Llyr, around benchmarking against good comparative international examples, where appropriate.
Yes, there we are, because one of my concerns was that the focus in a number of the countries in the OECD report are for nought to three-year-olds, whereas, of course, the policy focus here is for a slightly older age group.