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.