Diolch, Ddirprwy Lywydd. Thank you for the opportunity to move this motion today, and I want to formally do so on behalf of the Welsh Conservative group.

Last week, Wales received news of its results in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA as it is more commonly referred to. In advance of the publication of those results, the Welsh Government worked very hard to downplay expectations of any progress or improvement and, of course, once they were published, we all saw why. Those results, yet again, saw Wales languishing in the bottom half of the global education league table and they reconfirmed Wales’s shameful status as the worst performing school system in the UK—a title that we have held ever since our first set of PISA results back in 2006.

But what really makes these results all the more depressing than those of previous years is that PISA 2015 saw Wales perform worse than we did back in 2006 on every single measure—worse in literacy, worse in maths and worse in science. The results mark a decade of underachievement and a failure to make any progress, but that’s not the half of it. The results also showed us that there’s been a sustained decline in science skills since 2006, especially for the highest achieving pupils. A third of Welsh pupils were deemed to be low achievers in one or more subject—the highest of any of the UK nations. Welsh reading scores were on a par with Hungary and Lithuania, and pupils in England were seen to be three times more likely to be high achievers in science, reading and maths than here in Wales.

Whilst there was some comfort in that there was a smaller gap in achievement between pupils from the wealthiest and poorest backgrounds here in Wales, PISA actually suggests that this is mainly due to those more advantaged pupils simply not performing as well as they ought to be. Welsh pupils are doing more learning outside the school day than their English counterparts and yet still performing more poorly.

A litany of failure—failure by successive Welsh Labour-led Governments to raise our game, failure by education Ministers to turn things around, and failure by our First Minister to provide the first-class, world-beating education system that he promised them when he came to office back almost a decade ago. This is the sort of system, of course, that our young people deserve.

But, unfortunately, it’s very, very clear, from the results that were published last week, that the Welsh Labour-led Government that we’ve had here in Wales have not been getting it right. It’s for this reason that we’ll be voting for the Plaid amendment this afternoon, which believes that the failures are as a direct result of 16 years of inadequate Labour education policies. Although, I must say, I think it’s a bit rich of Plaid Cymru to try to pin all the blame on the Labour Party, when they were actually in coalition with the Labour Party for four of those years in the last decade. Now they’re crying crocodile tears, but it would have been better, frankly, if Plaid Cymru had made a bit more of a difference around the Cabinet table when they had a Deputy First Minister and many other Cabinet Ministers. So, why don’t you take some of the blame today when you stand up and make your speech? I’ll be very interested to hear what you’ve got to say. You need to acknowledge your role in those failures and apologise for it.

Previous poor PISA results, of course, have given rise to lots of tough talking. We’ve heard it all in this Chamber: we’ve heard promises to do better from the First Minister and previous Cabinet Secretaries, yet, in spite of this, the results published last week and the Welsh Government’s response to them do nothing, I’m afraid, so far, to give my party any confidence that we’ll see improvements any time soon. Instead, we’ve been told that Wales needs to hold its course and that we need to give reforms a bit more time to bed in. But the problem is that the Welsh Government has had a decade since similar results back in 2006 and yet we have seen failure upon failure to deliver the sea change in results that we all want to see.

Now what many commentators simply cannot understand is how it is that countries like Poland have been able to turn their education systems around in less than a decade, but the Welsh Government appears not to have been able to do so. Poland, of course, is a nation that had similar PISA results back in 2000 to ours in 2006. Yet it managed to improve its results by 2009 to become one of the top-ranking nations. Of course, they not only got up there in 2009, but they’ve maintained that performance ever since. They’ve managed to do so in a country that is larger—much larger—than Wales and where making changes is arguably much more difficult and, of course, they have a similar post-industrialised nation that they are dealing with.

But, of course, while Poland was making rapid progress in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Wales was looking elsewhere for inspiration under the previous education Minister, Jane Davidson—of course, she was looking towards Cuba. You couldn’t really make it up, could you? But that is where she was seeking inspiration for the future of the Welsh education system. Now, fortunately, we’ve moved on since G.I. Jane and, instead, now we’ve had other Ministers in place.

The current round of reforms to our curriculum, of course, were largely inspired by a nation that is somewhat closer to home—Scotland. It’s now six years since Scotland introduced its new school curriculum, much of which Wales is now seeking to emulate. But let’s just consider the results of their reforms for a moment. In last week’s PISA results, Scotland recorded its worst ever results on record—worst results in literacy, maths and science. Its ranking as a nation has been falling like a stone—from eleventh on the PISA ranking for reading in 2006 to twenty-third last week, from eleventh to twenty-fourth in maths, and from tenth to nineteenth in science. The proportion of Scottish children deemed to be performing below standard in science and reading has spiked since the last PISA tests in 2012, with the scores for both boys and girls dropping significantly, except, amongst girls, for maths. So, it’s no wonder that the Scottish education Secretary, John Swinney, has suggested there that the system is in need of ‘radical reform’—they were his words, not mine.

The Cabinet Secretary and others will no doubt attempt to suggest that Wales’s reforms are very different from those in Scotland. I accept that there are some differences. But no matter who we’re trying to kid, no matter who we’re trying to reassure, we know that our reforms are similar and that the author of those reforms is the very same author.

I’m not arguing that we need to abandon the reshaping of our curriculum here in Wales or that we shouldn’t continue with some of the other measures and actions that have been taken in the past around the literacy and numeracy framework. We don’t need to abandon those. But what is clear from Scotland is that these things alone are not going to deliver the sort of change in PISA rankings that needs to be delivered here in Wales. We cannot completely ignore these facts and carry on as usual. In our opinion, there needs to be a period of reflection and to ask honestly whether the Welsh Government’s planned reforms really are the best vehicle to move Wales forward, particularly given the Scottish experience. We believe, Cabinet Secretary, that it’s time to push the pause button on the curriculum reforms and take time to take stock of where we are.

I acknowledge that there’s a great deal of goodwill and support for curriculum reform and the sort of approach that we’re taking here in Wales, but we all—all of us in this Chamber and all of us who have a stake in our education here in Wales—need to be confident that the reforms that we are pitching for, and that we are aiming for, are going to make the sort of improvements that our schools and our education system need to see. I’m afraid that the evidence from Scotland suggests that that reform alone, even in conjunction with some of the other actions being taken by the Welsh Government, is not going to be enough.

Now, I’ve seen the Government amendment today. It asks us to note, and I quote,

‘the OECD’s reflections following its return visit to review the Welsh education system that many things are in place now that are putting Wales on a more promising track.’

But I ask this question: how on earth can Assembly Members note the OECD’s reflections when they haven’t been shared with us? We are yet to see written reports. We are yet to see any conclusions. We are yet to see any findings or recommendations that have emerged from that snapshot review. So, it’s a bit premature to ask us to note those things if we’ve been unable to have any sight of those things. That’s why we’ll be voting against the Welsh Government’s amendment today.

So, instead—just to be clear—what we’re calling for from the Welsh Government today is a clear strategy with measurable targets that will sit alongside these other pieces of work, which are already ongoing, to turn this performance around—and not by 2021; we want to see some improvements by the next set of PISA results in 2018. If Poland was able to do it, then I don’t see why Wales can’t either. We don’t want to just see improvements in one subject. We want to see all three of the PISA subjects—science, maths and reading—making progress. That’s what our young people, that’s what our children, deserve: nothing less than that sort of improvement. We need some very clear targets that, unlike previous targets, aren’t scrapped, but targets that are actually adhered to. We saw Leighton Andrews make a clear target that we should be in the top 20 by 2016. We’re not. So, it was abandoned before we realised the opportunity to even hold Leighton accountable to that target, because, of course, he’s not here. That target was abandoned by his successor, Huw Lewis, who replaced it with yet another target: this time to score over 500 in the PISA test, but not until 2021, which was conveniently after he had stepped down from the National Assembly.

So, we can’t keep kicking this thing down the road for other people to deal with in future Assemblies. We need to be accountable here in this particular Assembly to make sure that we make progress by 2018, and, yes, then again by 2021. We need policies to be introduced that are going to allow successful schools to thrive and to grow—those schools that are popular and that are going to work in partnership with the professions, the teaching professions and all the other stakeholders in our schools—to deliver the sea change that we need to see in terms of PISA. We’re not going to do that unless we’ve got a strategy with a timetable and clear targets.

So, our poor performance—let’s be clear—cannot continue. It will have consequences if we don’t deal with it, particularly for our economy and for future generations. We believe that we need to be ambitious and bold with our solutions, looking to the sort of excellence and the sort of achievement and the ground that has been made elsewhere in places like Poland and other nations around the world. We’re looking to you, Cabinet Secretary, for action, and for this reason I urge Members to support our motion today.