Item 5 on the agenda is a statement by the Cabinet Secretary for Education: Assessment for Learning—A Distinct Welsh Approach. I call on the Cabinet Secretary for Education, Kirsty Williams.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. The word ‘dysgu’ means both teaching and learning. As Professor Dylan William of University College London has pointed out, this linguistic and cultural perspective neatly demonstrates that the quality of teaching and learning cannot be separated. Assessment for learning means that teaching is always adaptive, specific to the learner’s needs and supports raising standards for all.

The recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report into our education reform journey recognised that a commitment to improving the teaching and learning in our schools is visible at all levels of the education system. The report recommended that the focus of our reforms should be on developing a high-quality teaching profession, making leadership a key driver for reform, ensuring equity in learning opportunities and student well-being, and moving towards a new system of assessment, evaluation and accountability that aligns with the new twenty-first century curriculum.

I spoke about our plans to develop leadership, to the Chamber, last week. Today, I want to focus on assessment: what good assessment looks like, what we have done to date and what we will do to take forward a new assessment and evaluation framework. And, along the way, Deputy Presiding Officer, I would also like to bust a few myths about our national tests. High-quality, ongoing assessment has a crucial role in teaching, learning and raising standards. It should be a natural and integral feature of classroom practice, and future assessment arrangements will give priority to this. We are working with schools, regional consortia and taking the advice of international assessment experts, such as Dylan William and John Hattie, to ensure that there is a renewed emphasis on assessment for learning and that the learner is at the heart of our proposals.

Assessment for learning is responsive teaching. It is the bridge between teaching and the way we discover whether activities and experiences in the classroom have brought about the learning that was intended. It is a powerful tool that can drive progress and raise achievement for all of our learners. Our vision is that assessment’s prime purpose is to provide information that can guide decisions about how best to progress young people’s learning and to report to their parents and carers on that progress. By so doing, assessment should improve learners’ learning, teachers’ teaching and parents’ and carers’ understanding.

Research from across the world has shown that assessment for learning offers us an effective way to meet our goals for a high-performing education system that provides learners with the means to become lifelong learners. Learners who are given high-quality feedback, who understand where they are in their learning, where they need to go next and, crucially, how they get there, are the most likely to make the most improvement.

As you will be aware from my recent written statement, perhaps one of the most exciting developments schools will see coming in the years ahead is the transition from the traditional paper reading and numeracy tests that learners sit each year, to an online, adaptive, personalised assessment. The new assessments will adapt the difficulty of the questions to match the response of the learner, adjusting to provide appropriate challenge for each individual. This means that all learners will be presented with questions that match and challenge their individual skills in reading and numeracy. Schools will receive high-quality, tailored information about each learner’s skills that they can use as additional evidence to plan the next steps for teaching and learning. The tests will be self-marking and compatible with schools’ information management systems. Teachers and learners will have high-quality, immediate and specific feedback, giving them a better picture of how they can address each learner’s strengths and weaknesses. There are many advantages to implementing personalised assessments, but let me be perfectly clear that the current paper tests share exactly the same purpose. There are still a few myths doing the rounds when it comes to the national tests, and I would like to take this opportunity to set the record straight.

Firstly, the tests are completely different from SATs in England, where results are published and schools ranked on the basis of test scores. Our tests were implemented to support teaching and learning, and were never intended to be high-stakes. The test results are not used by Welsh Government to judge school performance. The key to our approach is that the focus is on what the tests tell teachers, which is then used to help shape planning for learners’ next steps and to develop core skills and knowledge. We know that, at the moment, assessment for learning is not always well understood or embedded across every school. That is why I have refocused activity to improve confidence in its use.

Earlier this year, I ended the programme of external verification, and outlined our intentions to put in place a programme that would maintain the original aim of improving teacher assessment, but with more focus on the needs of teachers and their professional learning. In addition, we have made changes to the reporting on the national literacy and numeracy framework. Last week, schools were notified that they would only be expected to produce parental reports on the national literacy and numeracy framework for English, Welsh and maths at key stages 2 and 3, and language, literacy and communication and mathematical development during the foundation phase. Taking away the expectation of literacy and numeracy reports all the way across the curriculum will allow schools to focus efforts on literacy and numeracy development in effective curriculum planning and assessment for learning approaches.

In a coherent and collective approach to raising standards and expectations, assessment and accountability is critical to our ongoing reforms and the development and delivery of the new curriculum. However, in the past, the lines between the two have often been blurred, leading to negative unintended consequences in the classroom and a lack of focus on overall standards. In the next few weeks, I will make further announcements about accountability. Taken together, these will recognise and promote high-quality teaching and learning so that we raise standards, reduce the attainment gap and deliver an education system that is a genuine source of national pride and national confidence.

Thank you, Cabinet Secretary, for your statement, and for giving me advance notice of it. I think we’d all agree in this Chamber that we want to see a rigorous assessment process here in Wales that is fair to the learner, that helps to inform teachers about how best to respond to their needs, but that also acts as a benchmarking system across the whole of Wales, so that we can compare and contrast performance both between pupils within schools and, indeed, compare and contrast performance between different schools as well.

We know that the current system isn’t perfect. There’s far too much self-evaluation, if you like, within the current system and not enough in terms of standardisation, and so that’s why I was very pleased to welcome the shift to more responsive and personalised testing online when the Cabinet Secretary announced it earlier this year, and I think that that’s absolutely a step in the right direction. But I will say, Cabinet Secretary, that what we must also not be afraid to do is to continue to put our children and our young people in examination-type situations with paper tests. Because, at the end of the day, those high-stakes paper tests that they’ll be doing when they get to GCSE age and when they get to AS and A-level age, they’re going to be less phased by those if they’ve had lots of experience of being sat in a test-like situation. They’re not going to be sat on computers doing those tests, so it’s important that they have the experience of those tests both in the classroom and in the schools at different points.

Now, I know that you say—and you like to draw the big distinction between the SATs tests in England and the tests that we’ve had traditionally here in Wales, and you say that that’s not something where we’re going to rank schools. But, at the end of the day, they do need to be things that are used to manage performance within schools, and to manage local authority attention to schools and regional consortia’s attention to schools if weaknesses are identified in those outcomes. I think it’s only right that the outcomes of that testing are shared with parents, because, at the end of the day, parents should be empowered to be able to make decisions about which schools they want to see their children educated in. I think that the more information they can have, including information on tests and outcomes from those tests, the better.

I appreciate that you can swing the pendulum too far and just use markers on things like the achievements in these sorts of tests and overemphasise them, if you like, and not consider properly other things in schools. That’s why we’ve been, as a party, supportive of the green, amber and red system that has been developed by the Welsh Government, and it’s important that that is also a robust system. I know, Cabinet Secretary, that you want that to be a robust system that truly reflects, in an all-round and holistic sense, the performance of schools. But let’s not forget that the results that children and young people have in tests like the ones that we’re talking about today—this assessment for learning—are an important indicator in terms of school performance, and we must not ignore them.

We know that the OECD told us that there are many teachers at all levels who lack the skills to implement quality formative assessments and to use those assessment data to support students in their learning. I think that it’s only right to pick up on that point, and I was pleased that you made reference to the OECD and the work that they’re doing to oversee some of the implementation of this work in the future. We know, also, of course, from the recent Education Workforce Council survey of the education workforce in Wales, that one of the other problems we have is communicating to our teachers about the changes that are taking place here in Wales in our education system. So, I wonder, Cabinet Secretary, whether you’ll be able to tell us how you’re going to ensure that there’s an appropriate response from the teaching workforce to these new testing regimes as they’re being rolled out here in Wales, what you’re going to do to monitor the way that the teaching workforce is using the information in a confident way to change their practice so that they can support learners better, and what assurances you can give us as an Assembly that we’re not completely ditching the paper tests in literacy, in numeracy, and all those other subjects, so that our children can still be well prepared as they get on into later life to take those high-stakes tests that will come down the line.

Thank you very much, Darren, for your questions. I had hoped that the statement this afternoon would be able to help develop a broader understanding of the difference between assessment for learning, which is a crucial part of how we raise standards in our schools—and how that is a very different beast to what is accountability. The fact that the two have been melded together in the past, some of it in reality, some of it, often, myth and in the minds of practitioners, is one of the reasons why we’re not making the progress we need to make. Let me be absolutely clear: we need accountability in the Welsh education system. We know from past experience what happens if that accountability is taken away. Therefore, I will continue to ensure that our schools, our LEAs, and our regional consortia are held to account for their performance.

But accountability measures have to be the right ones, and they do have to be, I’m afraid to say, divorced from the principles of assessment for learning. So, you’re absolutely right, we will continue to use the categorisation system to be able to provide a holistic view of how individual schools are performing. We will continue to develop a robust inspection regime, with the publication of inspection reports via Estyn, which give parents the information that they need when looking at prospective schools for their children. And there is more we can do to improve both categorisation and, I believe, potentially, in conjunction with discussions with Estyn, how we can improve the inspection regime also. But let me be clear: assessment for learning is not part of that accountability regime. It is simply not a robust way—it is not a robust way to use assessment tests to judge the performance of a school. Cohorts can differ hugely.

Just last week, I visited Blaenymaes school in Swansea. The children entering that school are significantly behind, developmentally, than you would expect in the Welsh—[Interruption.]—in the Welsh population. Sixty per cent of those children are on free school—[Interruption.]—on free school meals. That is very different from a school in the same local education authority, and therefore relying simply on scores around standardised testing is not a fair way to judge. [Interruption.] Yes, you’re right. How we monitor that school is the progress that they’ve made, and I’m delighted that Blaenymaes school was recently given a ‘good’ and ‘good’ evaluation by Estyn because of the progress they’re able to make for those children. But it would not be right to use individual children’s test scores to judge the performance of that school. But parents need to know. Parents absolutely need to know, and there are no plans to stop parents being given access to their children’s test scores. It’s really important as a parent, and I’m a mum myself whose children have sat these assessments most recently. It’s really important to me and other parents to know where my child is, to have a standardised benchmark assessment to work alongside the individual teachers’ assessments around my children.

The paper tests will be phased out, Darren, and they will be phased out to an online adaptive system. One of the problems with the current testing is it does not take into account where a child is. We could have a child with a number of additional learning needs who sits down in front of a test, looks at the paper, and can’t answer the first question. That, potentially, is devastating to that child’s confidence. The beauty of an online adaptive test is that the questions will adapt to the ability of that child, to see where they are, and to push them to see how much they can do. That’s good news for all children, because you can get a better, more accurate picture of where that child is. The idea that, simply, children will be completely fazed if they sit down in front of an exam paper at 16 is, if I might say, fanciful, Darren. The reality is that teachers in high schools prepare their children for sitting those exams with mock papers, mock exams. Those things happen, and we have to divorce the two.

There are professional learning needs. We do need to get self-assessment better. It’s one of the weaknesses in our system. That’s been acknowledged by Estyn. That’s why continued moderation is really, really important. But, by moving some of the emphasis away, that gives us more time for teachers to concentrate on developing their skills in this area, and, as you know, we’ve put aside £5.6 million in this financial year for the consortia’s professional learning funds.

Thank you, Cabinet Secretary, for your statement. Donaldson did say, of course, in his ‘Successful Futures’ report, that dissatisfaction with current assessment arrangements was one of the strongest messages that he received. So, it’s good to see that this is being pursued, and I’m a bit fearful of saying the word ‘tests’ now, after that exchange. It’s been given a decent airing, so I won’t pursue it too much, only to recognise, of course, what Donaldson tells us, that the frequency of tests should be kept to a minimum in view of their impact on the curriculum and teaching and learning, because the danger is that people are taught to the test and then, all of a sudden, you find yourself going off on a tangent and not maybe focusing on the work that needs to be done.

I didn’t hear you mention self-assessment and peer assessment in your statement. Clearly, they are important factors in encouraging children and young people to take greater responsibility for their own learning. I know my children have a success criteria that they adhere to when they have homework, where they’re given a task that they’re meant to achieve, they need to understand how they’re going to achieve that, and then how they’re going to demonstrate what they’ve learnt from that task. So, I’m sure you’ll be able to tell us about the importance of self-assessment and peer assessment within this context, and teachers have their professional learning passports now—no different, potentially, for pupils in future; I know that Donaldson mentioned e-portfolios and e-badges, even, to record key achievements and experiences, and I’m wondering where we’re going on that, whether that’s something that you’re actively pursuing or not.

Your statement talks of an online adaptive personalised assessment, and teachers and leaders having high-quality immediate specific feedback. Donaldson also mentioned, of course, that we should increase the use of digital media and explore the opportunities to improve the immediacy of feedback to parents and carers. So, I’m just wondering whether this could be extended to allowing parents access to some aspects of this so that they can, in real time if you like, track the development of their children. I know many schools use Incerts. Whether there’s a public-facing element that could be utilised in that respect, it would be good to hear what your thinking is on that front.

Moving to more of an automated online system clearly has its strengths. I’m just looking for reassurance—and I’m sure you’ll give it to me—that we won’t take our eye off the ball in terms of continually needing to build teachers’ capacity to assess, and that we don’t just leave it to computers. So, that’s certainly something that we need to be wary of.

The children and young people committee clearly have been scrutinising implementation of the new curriculum, and we did hear contrasting views about the relationship between designing the curriculum and setting the assessment framework. Some people were saying, ‘Well, tell us what you want to assess and we’ll design you a curriculum’, and others were saying—and more rightly as well, in my view—that a purposes-driven curriculum starts with purposes and proceeds from there. Although your somewhat discombobulated, maybe, response to us in committee that it isn’t a chicken or egg, that it’s chicken and egg at the same time—I’m not sure whether that’s possible, but I’d like you maybe to reassure us now that the sector is getting the clarity it needs about the interrelationship, which we touched on earlier somewhat, actually, so that we can be confident that the assessment processes that we’re moving towards are appropriate for the new curriculum and the future that we’re moving towards.

Thank you very much, Llyr, for those questions and observations. You’re quite right; Professor Donaldson told us that the frequency of testing should be kept to a minimum, but he was also very clear in his report that external standardised testing provides important benchmarking information and should be used in combination with school tests and teacher assessments. So, in no way did Donaldson say we should stop doing national tests. He saw that as part of a holistic picture of how we can develop our assessment regimes. Actually, what Professor Donaldson recommended in his report was that, and I quote:

Innovative approaches to assessment, including interactive approaches, should be developed’.

So, actually, our move towards interactive online adaptive testing is in response to a recommendation that was made in that report.

You’re absolutely clear: if you look at pretty pictures about what assessment for learning actually looks at, one of the crucial components of that is peer review and the ability of children themselves to look critically at their own work and, indeed, help mark the work of their classmate alongside them. I don’t know whether your children use the tickled pink/green for growth method, which allows them to use pink highlighters to highlight the good bits, and then you use a green highlighter to identify the bits that maybe need to grow and need to be improved, but it’s a very important part of a strategy of developing that self-critique and the ability to identify. There are many, many, many innovative ways of using it. Wrong answers, for instance: if a class is getting the answer right all of the time, who’s learning? Sometimes, we need to get things wrong to identify what is it that led us to give that answer to reflect on that. So, there are lots and lots of different approaches. But the ability to engage children in that, not simply have their work marked by a teacher or reported on by a teacher, but actually to be able to look critically at their own work and that of others, is crucially important.

You talked about professional learning passports. There’s absolutely a role for the professional learning passport, but I think we can do it better than what we’ve got at the moment. I don’t think it is in its optimum state to really get teachers to engage with it. But, for children’s sake, many, many, many schools employ strategies for compiling e-portfolios. Only this morning, I was discussing with a headteacher the use of Building Blocks, which is an app developed by a Llanelli company. They use that to capture and record work. It allows people to reflect on that, share it with other classmates to have a look at, and be able to send it home. So, I’m looking at what more we can do to use that kind of technology in our learning.

One of the significant improvements I hope that online adaptive testing will bring to us, Llyr, is more timely responses. You will know, like I will, that the tests were sat by our children a number of weeks ago. I don’t know about schools in your area, or indeed in Darren’s, but I will probably get my children’s tests in the last week of term—the last week of term—where there is little time to go into school and have a discussion with the teacher. And then, the summer holidays come, and the momentum around that is lost. So, one of the benefits of moving to this system is that you will have instantaneous results and schools will be able to do it at times of the year that best suit them and their children. So, I’m hoping that one of the benefits of moving to this is greater flexibility, and that it will allow for greater parental engagement in discussing test results with their schools, and that is crucial.

We know that, after the quality of the teacher in the classroom, parental engagement in your child’s education is the second most important factor. We have to find new and innovative ways to encourage parents to be engaged in their children’s education. Again, I think, digitally—because, let’s face it, how many school gates do you see with everybody on their smartphones—digitally is one area in which we can increase those conversations between schools and parents about their children’s learning.

We do need to do more in terms of professional learning to support teachers’ skills in assessment for learning. As I said in my statement, and acknowledged in my statement, it is not as embedded and as universal as I would like it to be, and this will continue some of the ongoing conversations we have with regional consortia around professional learning.

What comes first and how do we assess a new curriculum? One of the lessons I think that we have learnt from Scotland is that they developed their curriculum and then thought about the assessment later. That’s been one of the problems that I think the Scottish education system has suffered from. So, we are looking at assessment and evaluation as we develop the curriculum, so that we are mindful of the fact that, yes, we need to have a purpose base, but are also mindful about how actually we will assess for that, and how will we test for that as we develop it. So, you’ll be aware that that work is ongoing, in conjunction with the work on the AOLEs, because I think if we leave it till the end, and have it as an add-on, we will defeat the purpose of what assessment is about. And I go back to my statement: assessment shouldn’t be an add-on; it should be an integral part of teachers’ practice in the classroom.

And finally, Michelle Brown.

Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and thank you for your statement, Cabinet Secretary. Whilst I support the use of the latest technology in the classroom, it must always remain in a way that improves the education for the child, and doesn’t simply ease the teacher’s workload. The answer to overworked teachers should always be more teachers, not more computers. There is no substitute for the praise of a teacher who is respected and liked by their pupils, and a computer can never give the encouragement that a teacher can. On the one hand, we are telling parents it’s a bad idea for their children to spend too much time in front of their iPads and laptops, but when it suits us, we encourage it in the classroom. By increasing the use of computers for assessment, we are downgrading the status of teachers and encouraging isolation in the classroom, when we should be fostering interaction. An apple was only ever meant to be a gift for the teacher, not a replacement for them.

I welcome that the Cabinet Secretary values personalised assessment, but I certainly would question whether this is a new thing, as the statement infers. Surely, teachers assess pupils in terms of each child or young person’s individual development on an ongoing basis already. Surely, they’ve been doing this since the profession began. As regards the Cabinet Secretary’s attempt to differentiate the tests that school pupils in England and Wales sit, I’d say that it’s irrelevant to the child what the school or anybody else will do with those results. A test is a test is a test from the point of view of the person sitting it.

So, I would like to ask the Cabinet Secretary what thoughts she has had on making sure children remain primarily educated by humans rather than programmers. Would it be sensible to propose some kind of monitoring of the amount of time pupils spend working and being assessed via computer? Have you asked the young people and their parents for their thoughts on the increasing androidisation of their education?

Could I thank Michelle for her questions? Let me be absolutely clear for the Member and for the Chamber: this is not about replacing teachers with computers; it is about being able to supply teachers with instantaneous, good-quality information about the abilities of an individual child—something that, at the moment, we do in one way, but I think we can improve upon it.

As I said in my statement, the purpose of these tests is absolutely about the child. It’s about having the information that we need for teachers and parents to assess how we help that child to develop more. The fact that actually it reduces workload on teachers and gives us better quality information in a better time frame are some of the other reasons why this is a good thing to do. But I try and judge myself, in everything that I do, Michelle, on the basis of the mantra ‘child first and always’. I judge that moving to these systems is better for individual children in Wales.

We are all concerned about screen time for children and the impact of digital technology on children’s lives. We spent a great deal of time last week in this Chamber debating that. We all acknowledge that there are disbenefits and benefits, but let me be clear: this is a test over a short period of time that probably most schools will decide to do only once a year. This is not sitting children in front of a screen for hours and hours and hours. I reiterate again: this is not about replacing teachers with computers; this is allowing us to harness the power of new technology to help teachers do even better for the children in their classroom.

Thank you very much, Cabinet Secretary.