Could I thank Suzy Davies for those questions? Deputy Presiding Officer, she does herself a disservice by focusing on the fact that she is new to the job. I think the points that you've raised are really relevant and important things that we need to discuss.

If I could just go through them as comprehensively as I can, I think there is—. What the Member conflates is the assessment and evaluation framework, which will be published in the springtime. That is part of our work on developing the new curriculum. What we need to do as we develop the new curriculum is not just focus on content, although clearly that is very, very important, but actually how we are going to measure individual children's progress against that content. Members will be aware of—and sometimes they raise with me—the issues around Scotland. I think one of the lessons we have learnt from the Scottish experience is that they tried to bolt on assessment and evaluation after they had dealt with content. We’re trying to do that at the same time so that there is a clear understanding. What we’re talking about here is the self-evaluation of individual schools’ performance, which is a slightly different thing.

The whole purpose is to increase visibility and to provide more information to those that are interested, so that the school itself can reflect on its own performance, where it needs to improve, where it’s doing well and what progress it can make. The Member quite rightly said, ‘Is there a danger of people marking their own homework and choosing what they want to be evaluated on?’ One of the problems that the OECD identified with the current system of self-evaluation—because it does happen in school—is that there is no national approach. There are various toolkits, there are various methods of doing it, and one of the things that I'm clarifying today is that there will be a national approach, a shared understanding, of how each school will do this so that there is a coherence across the whole system, so that we can improve upon what has happened to date, and also, as she rightly identified, make sure that that applies throughout the whole system.

I appreciate that, because we are changing systems around accountability, that does provide a challenge with year-on-year comparisons. But what we’re doing, I believe, is moving towards a system of more intelligent accountability measures in our schools that I believe will drive the right kind of behaviours. The Member, quite rightly, talked about parity of esteem between academic and more vocational qualifications, and school leaders making the right decision for each pupil. I would argue that, under the old regime, we had incentivised perhaps school leaders playing the system that made the school look better, rather than actually thinking about what was right in the needs for each individual child. That’s why one of the matters that will be considered as part of the self-evaluation—although I don’t want to pre-empt the work that the OECD is doing, because the OECD, Estyn and the profession are developing the evaluation framework; we’re not doing it on our own, and we have international oversight—will be to look at the breadth of the curriculum, and actually what is on offer, so that our school system does meet the needs of a variety of learners and understands that that comes from a breadth of curriculum and a breadth of offer.

Of course, the Member will be aware that we’ve already moved away from a level 2 inclusive performance measure for secondary schools to a capped points score, which means that every pupil counts. In the past, if you concentrated on your C-D borderlines and got them over the edge, actually, that’s what drove behaviours in school. Under the new system, every single child will count. What they do will count. This will mean that every child matters and they deserve the equal attention of their school staff.

I take your point about relationships with the families. After the quality of teaching, we know that parental engagement in a child’s education is the second biggest factor that will affect how that child does. So, good working relationships between families is absolutely crucial, and I understand that that has been part of the assessment that is being looked at at the moment. Cross-pollination is exactly what we want from this process of getting schools to work more closely together—and schools and regional consortia and Estyn—so we get better at sharing good practice. One of my constant frustrations in the system is that we have excellent, world-leading practice in some Welsh schools, and, surely, it can’t be beyond the wit of us to ensure that that is consistently applied in all of our schools. And part of this process is all about making sure that schools are working collaboratively together—that'll be part of the evaluation—and I'm working with my other schools. I have responsibility, yes, to my children, but I also have responsibility to the cluster and to the nation. And also that summary of the evaluation will be available to parents. At the moment, the information is really limited that's available to parents, so this is about giving greater visibility to parents beyond just what's available at the moment.

Can I just disabuse the Member of one thing? There is a difference between assessment and accountability. We have to get back to a system where assessment is used for the purposes of learning and for driving a child's educational journey. Assessment should never be about systems of accountability, because if you cross those over, that's where you get gaming in the system. That's where you don't get a true picture of what is going on. So, there is a difference between assessment, which we want to drive learning in our schools—. Assessment is the bridge between teaching and learning, and we can't have that being caught up in an accountability regime. Accountability stands separate, and that's what we're developing: robust assessment measures to drive teaching and learning in our schools but also robust accountability measures by which individual schools, regional consortia and the Government can be held to account.