 I have spoken before about how lucky we are to be able to meet like this each year. All of our headteachers, alongside our partners within education, meeting under one roof, sharing and communicating news, views and best practice, few other countries have this advantage. For our collaborative reforms to be a success, then communication will be key. And on that theme of communication, trivia buffs amongst you may know that today not only marks the anniversary of the day Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for the telephone, but also when the first ever transatlantic telephone call took place. Now whilst today's conference may not make the history books in quite the same way, it really is a fantastic opportunity. Of course this conference is not only your only opportunity to speak to us. Over the coming years, your feedback will be more important than ever and needless to say, we will be asking for your feedback throughout the rollout of our new curriculum. I consider myself and I hope you do too, a Minister who is keen to listen and appreciate the different viewpoints. As you will know last summer I took time to reflect on conversations with teachers, parents and educators throughout the system regarding the implementation of the new curriculum. The consensus was that by rolling out the curriculum with care and collaboration, this will provide the right amount of preparation time for schools and teachers. But let me be clear, that's not time to stand still, but time to provide feedback, further engage with the new curriculum and be fully prepared for the new approach. So the new curriculum and assessment arrangements will be available for schools to feed back, test and refine in Easter 2019. Following that period all schools will have access to the final curriculum from 2020 allowing them to get ready and prepared for statutory rollout in September 2022. So I want to be clear. We, I, need to hear from you over these next two days and also in the months and years ahead. We've moved on a lot since that first telephone call across the Atlantic. That call linked two countries that are over 3,000 miles apart, within Wales being a small country, just imagine what we can achieve by working closely together. We need to use our size as our advantage. But now of course being a small country does not mean that we should not think big. As Cabinet Secretary one of my first years to officials was to seek out ideas and evidence from across the world. All too often in the Celtic nations we view things through the prism of the English experience. And because of that influence and scale we sometimes forget that policy and principles over the border are the exception to international practice and development rather than the norm. So over the last 18 months many of our flagship developments here in Wales have been shaped by a truly international perspective. Our opposition to segregation and selection in schools is based on OECD examples. The importance of reducing class sizes to help those to close the attainment gap and raise standards and support teachers draws on the North American experience in particular. Our investment and focus on rural education has been informed by best practice in Ontario. Having been invited to join the Atlantic Rim Collaboratory working with the likes of Ireland, Finland and California we are able to test our approaches on wellbeing, reducing bureaucracy and emerging thoughts on accountability and measuring performance. And our wider reforms to further and higher education are led by research from the very best international leaders and experts. So as I often say to be the best we need to learn from the best and I'm delighted that we have Steve and Marco and of course Graham here today to share their thoughts and to hear from you. But I am equally keen that as we innovate we also influence international approaches and that's why we've been working with Ireland to update them on our pioneer school model. That's why we've been briefing Ontario on our curriculum and assessment reforms and that's why we've been updating Scotland on the success of regional working. And these aren't just government-led initiatives. There are opportunities for teachers and others to get involved. We have to be confident in ourselves, in our reforms, in our approach and in our collective ability to raise standards. Now you'll know that our National Mission Action Plan published last year sets out the four objectives which will enable us to fulfil our mission to raise standards, reduce the attainment gap and deliver an education system that is a source of national pride and public confidence. These four objectives support bringing our new curriculum to life and those objectives are developing a high quality education profession, inspirational leaders working collaboratively to raise standards, strong and inclusive schools committed to excellence, equity and wellbeing and finally robust assessment, evaluation and accountability arrangements supporting a self-improvement system. Our focus at this conference is that last objective, robust assessment, evaluation and accountability. So as we develop and design our new curriculum and assessment arrangements, questions of accountability are being considered and addressed. My starting point is that school and system level assessment and evaluation will drive improvement for all learners, that we ensure and enhance public confidence in our system, that we better recognise the value added by teachers and schools and that there is self-evaluation and peer review at every level of the system. Now other sessions today will provide you with more detail on our current thinking, already informed by many of you has had teachers, unions, international experts and evidence and many others working within our system. I just mentioned the need to better measure the value added provided by teachers and schools across the system and you have my guarantee that we will move strongly in that direction. We know that despite our many strengths and improvements Welsh education still faces many, many challenges and none is bigger than tackling the difference in attainment between children from our most deprived communities, children who are care experienced and their peers. Now I understand that poverty and its persistent barrier to learning has its origins well beyond the school gates and schools don't have the answer to every problem. But as education secretary it is my job and I would argue as school leaders it is your job that once these children and young people are under our care we will from day one support them to reach their full potential. I have spoken many times of my aspiration for a system that complements and combines equity and excellence and that is a key theme of our national mission. Now we have made good progress over recent years, the gap has certainly narrowed and that is thanks to you and your staff's hard work, dedication and commitment but we must continue that momentum and we must continue that focus. The pupil development ground a policy as you know that is very close to my heart continues to make a big difference in supporting these pupils. Evidence shows that schools are forever learning new and innovative ways of making every penny of that grant make a difference and I urge you all to look at the ever growing body of evidence and continue to learn from one another in our ever growing self-improving system. I am also conscious that while as a government we could pat ourselves on the back for the progress that has been made there is no room for complacency in this regard. We must never lower our expectations for any of our young people no matter what their background or their home experience. I want we need equity and excellence for all and that is why I will never apologise for keeping the pressure up rather than taking the easy option of coasting or offering up a council of despair that things can never improve for these children from their most challenging communities. I welcome the strong action that has been taken in switching pupils from VTech science for instance to GCSE science. Now I understand that this may well skew our overall GCSE results for a while and it makes it easy for my opponents and the media to attack us but you know what I believe that we can be proud that thousands upon thousands of more pupils in Wales are now taking science GCSEs as opposed to BSEC. That gives us the opportunity to raise standards and improve opportunities for all of our learners and most of all for our learners from our poorest background. It's a tough decision but I believe it's the right one. Now we are achieving match in moving forward together as a self-improving system. We now have a regional model for school improvement based on many of the principles of a self-improving system. We have strengthened the notion of a self-improving system through the role of schools in providing leadership for others, for example in our pioneer network, the national schools categorisation system with its focus on support, the emerging ITE partnerships, the growing number of schools committed to developing as login organisations themselves and many initiatives designed to share subject and leadership expertise. These show that we are using our scale as a system to our advantage, thinking big in our ambitions and aspirations but nimble enough to work together to move forward with a shared purpose. Now I didn't think it would be right or indeed credible to speak to you today without touching upon funding issues. This is raised with me as you can imagine in every school that I visit and I understand the importance of this. I am someone who throughout my political life has fought as a priority for additional funding to support our schools. As an assembly member and leader of an opposition party I argued additional school funding every single year in negotiation with previous Welsh governments in exchange for the support of their budgets. This led to the establishment of the pupil development grant, as I mentioned earlier, which is now worth an additional £90 million for schools every year across Wales. Since becoming education secretary we as a government have even gone further by doubling the support available via this grant for our very youngest learners. I have also listened to teachers on the front line who raised with me the problems that they face teaching large class sizes in our primary sector and in response will we be making available over this assembly term some £36 million to support that new policy. Now many assembly members have tried to resist this initiative but we have listened to those working on the front line. And you know that it has not passed me by that there are particular funding pressures. I hear it often enough from head teachers across the country that time, crucial time and effort and funding is taken up by school maintenance issues as opposed to supporting learners. So that is why over the weekend I announced as a government that we will be making available an additional £14 million which will be allocated direct to schools. This will address small scale maintenance costs and every single school across our country will benefit from this money and I am determined it will find its way into your budgets. Yet believe me when I say that I recognise even with these additional resources that school budgets are stretched, times are hard. The continued austerity agenda has led to the budget of the Welsh government being reduced by well over £1 billion and I am afraid to say that I don't see these hard times ending any time soon. The need for austerity and indeed the word austerity trips very easy off the lips of certain politicians but it is you on the front line that are dealing with what austerity really really means. The Welsh government will continue to call for additional resources to be spent on our public services which would mean we would be more able to further support schools. Yet I also recognise and I see it in the innovative approaches that head teachers across our nation are taking that funding isn't the answer to everything. Funding standards is not just about spending more money but we have to recognise the pressures are real but at the same time we cannot allow the pressure on budgets to reduce our ambition for our children because they deserve better than that. I also can't leave you today without mentioning PISA. Everybody in our system must understand that PISA allows us to judge ourselves against the world. It remains the recognised international benchmark for skills. It has never been more important to demonstrate to ourselves, perhaps particularly to ourselves and to the world that our young people can compete with the best. PISA may not be in school performance measures but it is high stakes for us as a country. If you subscribe to the national mission and if you are sitting in this room then I really hope that you do then you must also subscribe to the importance of PISA. As improved results in these international tables are integral to our education system installing national pride and public confidence that we all want to deliver. So that first transatlantic phone call I mentioned at the beginning of my contribution may indeed have been historic but you know what? The conversation that took place on that momentous call was actually about the weather. For all of us here today it is less about how we are communicating but more about what we are communicating. We as a country are embarking on an exciting reform programme that will one way or another transform the future lives of a generation, their lives, our society, being shaped by all of you the people in this room. If you ask me that's better than any conversation about the weather but together we are also in the process of making Welsh education history. Diolch yn fawr.