Thank you. Mark's questions are next.
Cabinet Secretary, how would you assess the impact of PDG on attendance and hopefully subsequent engagement with education from children who have free school meals?
I think what's important to note is that, as Estyn have themselves said, over the period of the last inspection report, we have seen improvements in attendance, but I do think we need to, again, look at how PDG can support this particular agenda. And as always in the Welsh education system, there are some excellent examples of how schools use the money to address this. Ysgol y Preseli in Pembrokeshire is a very good example of how they've deployed their money. Forgive me; I can't off the top of my head remember the name of the primary school I visited, again in north Wales, where the school has proactively used this money, and they actually send teaching assistants out of school in the morning before the start of the school day, and they actually have a walking bus. They call at homes for children, and they walk the children to the breakfast club. So, they're proactively going out into the community and making sure that those children are in the classrooms, because the teacher said, 'We recognised we had a problem with attendance. We tried a variety of means of improving that, but in the end we have taken this quite bold step—we actually send the staff out and they create that walking bus, and they walk the children into school'. They say that they know that, for some of those children, because of the difficult circumstances they and their families are living in, they probably wouldn't be in school if it wasn't for that proactive approach. So, we're looking again at what more we can do to support this particular agenda in terms of improving attendance, because although, again, there are examples of good practice, there is still a gap between the attendance of free-school-meal pupils and non-free-school-meal pupils. And, of course, we can have the best curriculum in the world with really high-quality teaching, but unless the children are in the classes then we're not going to make the difference for them. Whilst that differential exists, then it's going to be hard to close the attainment gap for those children.
I was actually quite shocked just reading in advance of this meeting that the proportion attending 95 per cent or more, who have pretty full attendance, was only 35 per cent for free-school-meal children at level 4, compared to 60 per cent for non-free-school-meal pupils. It still is an extraordinary difference. My colleague here showed me, I think, last week, a graph showing the link between attendance and attainment, in particular. When people were absent, a lot of the—. As I'm sure you're aware, there's a huge connection. What more can PDG do to deal with it? In the example you give I can see how a school with an awful lot of free-school-meal children could do that, but a lot of the free-school-meal children are actually in schools that don't have that high a proportion of free school meals, where it would be much more challenging to bring in that type of initiative.