Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:44 pm on 13 June 2017.
Thank you very much, Lee, for that. As you said, implementation is everything and the document in itself will not get us there. I think what is absolutely clear is that, in ensuring successful implementation, we need a number of factors. We need individual teachers who feel confident and skilled in the use of the DCF, and I outlined to Llyr some of the proactive ways in which we are making those professional learning opportunities available to existing teachers. We need to make sure that, in our initial teacher education, training our new generation of teachers, when they are looking at issues of pedagogy around literacy and numeracy, this will form part of our new ITE offer so that teachers coming out of our institutes of higher education already have these skills and feel confident and knowledgeable about how digital literacy can work through all of their lessons.
Leadership, as always in all aspects of school improvement and raising standards in our schools, is absolutely clear. Programmes that will be delivered by the leadership academy are currently being developed, but given the importance of digital competency alongside numeracy and literacy, as the three underpinning themes of our educational reform journey, one would expect and, indeed, require the ability of school leaders to demonstrate their commitment and their competency in this particular field.
With regard to assessment and who is best to judge what goes on in our schools, I think, like any organisation as new technology develops, an organisation has to test itself as to whether it has the right approaches to be making judgments on others. As you’ll be aware, Estyn are already reviewing and have made adaptations to their current schools inspection framework. They’re currently developing a new framework for how they inspect individual local education authorities, but I’m sure Estyn would be the first to say that their overall approach to how Estyn can contribute to school improvement, and its role in our national mission of education improvement, will have to be looked at at some stage.