8. What is the Welsh Government doing to help reduce unnecessary burdens on teachers? (OAQ51109)

Thank you, Joyce. Reducing unnecessary bureaucracy and enabling teachers to spend more time supporting pupils’ learning is a priority for me and the Government. We are continuing to work closely with the profession to build capacity and reduce workload, through reducing bureaucracy, improved policy delivery and better and smarter ways of working.

Thank you, Cabinet Secretary, and I really do welcome that much needed investment from Welsh Government. As I’m sure most of us agree, whilst non-teaching activities are critical to the running of a school, teachers’ time would be far better directed at teaching activities, and reducing unnecessary burdens is essential to achieving that. So, Cabinet Secretary, as I understand it, there will be a pilot run in 11 local authority areas in groups of primary schools. Do you have any details on whether any of those are in Mid and West Wales and do you have any idea when we can expect to see the first school where business managers are in post?

Joyce, you’re absolutely right. It should not be the job of headteachers to be spending their time trying to source paper or toilet rolls, managing cleaning contracts, or trying to deal with issues around the building or the IT. We need those professional people to focus on teaching and learning, developing the curriculum, and supporting their staff to deliver outstanding experiences and lessons for their children. That’s why, you’re quite right, recently we have launched a pilot, and I’m very pleased to say both Powys and Carmarthenshire councils have been awarded funding from the Welsh Government towards recruiting school business managers for mainly primary school clusters in their local areas. This will involve a total of over 30 schools in both Powys and Carmarthenshire, and business managers are currently in the process of being appointed and should be in place later on this year.

Cabinet Secretary, one way to help reduce unnecessary burdens on teachers is to encourage a greater dialogue between school leaders and teachers through informal workload impact assessments whenever new policies are introduced, so that a constructive and frank discussion about the impact of Government policies is always taking place. Therefore, I’d be grateful if you could tell us if this is something that you are advocating, and, if so, could you also tell us a bit more about how your discussions with headteachers and school leaders about the introduction of some kind of workload impact assessments are currently progressing?

Thank you, Paul. It is really important that there’s a shared understanding around the expectations between school leaders and their staff. Sometimes, those expectations are driven by external accountability measures, so the school leaders are putting work onto staff because they think that’s what is expected from them, either by their regional consortium, by the local education authority or, crucially, by Estyn. That’s why, you’ll be aware, earlier on this year, we launched a resource for all schools and all practitioners that set out very clearly the expectations of regional consortia and Estyn, for instance, when it came to the issue around marking and assessment. That’s been supported by each of the teaching unions and I hope that that is proving to be a very valuable resource in all of our schools, and that school leaders are taking it seriously.

We constantly need to look to the profession to how we can work smarter and better together, and challenge ourselves as a Government: are we requiring things of schools that are adding to bureaucracy, but not adding to learning? We’ll constantly keep that under review when I meet with school leaders, via a series of conferences that we hold.

Thank you, Cabinet Secretary.