What I would say is that the reason that Samaritans did our report on exclusions from school rested with—. They began with anecdotal information coming through to us around individual distress and from projects working with young people who'd been excluded. And there are projects that are working with young people who are being excluded—I mean primary school children. And the major thing we say in our report is that we—. So, this is enough to ask us some serious questions, to which we don't know the answer, unless we actually do some serious work on this. So, I would reiterate what we say in our report: that we need to examine this. It's a really important issue, and the life trajectory of those young people is being impacted by their exclusion.
Okay. You may not be able to answer this, but to what extent do you think school accountability measures are having an impact on the numbers of exclusions?
Well, I think it's very interesting, looking at Estyn's pupil registration practices report from October last year, which looks at off-rolling, and I think that you see, specifically at year 10 to 11, a strong impact: around 4 per cent of pupils are off-rolled between year 10 and 11, but you're also seeing a number between 1.5 and 2 per cent that are off-rolled in any given year between year 8/year 9, year 9/year 10. So, I think it's clear that there's been a substantial increase in the numbers off-rolled in that year 10 to 11, but what I think is concerning for me is the normalisation, throughout the system, at secondary school level, where there's off-rolling between year 7/8, year 8/9. Based around there being around 30,000 to 32,000 in each cohort, then you're looking at 500 to 600 children in any given year, and I think we need to understand why that is the norm, what could be done around that, as well as looking into the obvious impact of that at year 10 to 11. The Estyn work is quite factual. It's looking at the numbers. I think we need to dig a bit deeper and understand the story behind that and whether there's a specific reason why schools are doing that, related to the accountability measures. It'll be interesting to see the impact of changes towards capped 9 et cetera, but I think we need a bit more qualitative work on that rather than just the quantitative work that's currently available.
Okay. Thank you.