FIRST Minister of Wales Mark Drakeford has said he hopes to open some of the tourism sector in Wales during the summer.

Speaking ahead of unveiling his coronavirus plan today, Mr Drakeford told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that Wales would take a "phased approach" to releasing lockdown but would not be putting dates on the phases.

Mr Drakeford said: "In the end we decided that if you put a date in, everybody just focuses and gets fixated on the date instead of talking about how you know whether the time is right to lift restrictions.

"We will know because we will track a series of indicators, admissions to hospital, occupation of critical care beds by people with coronavirus, the circulation in the community represented by that R figure."

Mr Drakeford said if the R level is low enough and capacity in the NHS is high enough to deal with an increase "we will have confidence to move further along the spectrum".

On tourism, he added: "We would like to be able to open some aspects of tourism during the season so that people can begin to earn an income, but it will have to be very careful and cautious and it will have to be with the consent of the community."

The First Minister also told Good Morning Britain that he would like to see Year 6 pupils and children facing exams next year back at school before the summer holidays.

Schools in Wales are currently open for vulnerable children and the children of key workers but "new cohorts" will not be brought into schools on June 1, he said.

Mr Drakeford said the Welsh Government would be speaking to parents and staff so they knew everything had been done to make the school environment safe and give them "confidence to return".

"We'd like to take a bit longer to do that, we think it will pay off in the end and that's the nature of the way that we would do things in Wales," he explained.

The Welsh Government is to publish a "road map" out of lockdown later today.

Mr Drakeford described it as a "traffic light system" that moved from lockdown into the "first cautious step" of the red zone, then the amber zone, and finally the green zone.