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.