How useful is PISA for you in helping school improvement? I know that it's not always the thing that you enjoy watching or looking out for. But, genuinely, how useful is it?
It is one of a range of tools that we need to look at. Siân, quite rightly, talked about consistency. PISA is one thing where there is a level of consistency, so it will continue to be, I think, an important part of how we test how our system is doing.
We know that you are a little bit encouraged, but we are not out of the woods yet. You mentioned this in Plenary when we talked about PISA. How confident are you that we are on track for meeting these targets that were set before your time, or do you think that having those targets is helpful? Is it setting up aspirations that are incapable of being met within a period of time?
Well, those long-term targets of a score around 500 are part of 'Our National Mission', and we have to keep the pressure on to strive. They are testing, but we have to keep the pressure on to strive to reach them. In some cases, I can be quite encouraged. If we look at reading scores for girls, we are almost there, but that just demonstrates what a journey we've got with our boys to address. For me, one of the ways in which we will reach those targets and achieve them is further progress on our more able and talented children. Although we are now performing at an OECD average, I will be the first person to admit that, although we have seen an improvement in the higher level skills of our more able and talented children, we do not perform at an OECD average with regard to those level 6 and level 5 scores.