Item 3 on the agenda this afternoon is a statement by the Cabinet Secretary for Education: the evaluation and improvement arrangements. I call on the Cabinet Secretary for Education, Kirsty Williams.

Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer.

It has been a widely held view that, for too long, Wales’s education accountability system has not had the desired effect in raising standards. In fact, in some instances, it has led to unintended consequences with detrimental effects on individual pupils’ education. These unintended consequences are well rehearsed. From schools overly focusing on the arbitrary C grade boundary regardless of pupil progress and ability, to cases where schools focus so much on what they believe they are held to account for that they’ve narrowed the curriculum to an unacceptable level. Our national mission action plan sets out our vision for an assessment and evaluation system that is fair, coherent and based on our shared values for Welsh education. International evidence and the message within Wales is clear: we must ensure a coherent approach that avoids those unintended consequences, and contributes towards raising standards in all of our classrooms, by all of our teachers, for all of our learners.

I have already taken action, such as addressing incorrect use of GCSE early entry and announcing new interim and transitional performance measures for secondary schools to ensure that every child counts regardless of their background or their ability. The overall assessment and evaluation framework will be published next year alongside the new curriculum areas of learning and experience. It will describe how learners will be assessed in schools, how teachers will be appraised and the evaluation arrangements for the system as a whole.

Today, Deputy Presiding Officer, I am pleased to update the Chamber on how we are delivering the commitment to develop and publish new evaluation and improvement arrangements for the entire education system. The arrangements will have four integrated strands that will apply equally to schools, regional consortia and the Welsh Government. These are self-evaluation, peer review and validation, evaluation indicators, and the publication of an action plan.

As in many of the best-performing education systems in the world, robust and continuous self-evaluation provides the mechanism to improve. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and Estyn are working with practitioners to design a self-evaluation framework, which will ensure coherence, criteria and a common language for self-evaluation across schools, local authorities, consortia, Estyn and the Welsh Government. Schools will be required to self-evaluate across a number of areas, such as their impact on pupils’ attainment and on their well-being, the breadth of the curriculum, their capacity to improve and their effectiveness to collaborate with other schools.

The main purpose of our approach to self-evaluation is to identify areas of success and failure, where good practice can be shared and, importantly, where failure can be urgently addressed. I'm also clear that the self-evaluation process must require an external perspective if it is to benefit from the necessary challenge needed. Therefore, it is our intention that all schools will have their self-evaluation validated. The school’s self-evaluation will be discussed with the consortia on an annual basis to determine what level of support the school requires or the level of support it can provide to other schools. Furthermore, it's hoped that this self-evaluation will then be validated by Estyn as part of their new inspection process. Importantly, as a school’s self-evaluation will be expected to be peer reviewed by other schools, this will help us to develop our culture of partnership and school-to-school support, while also building capacity across clusters of schools so that they can gradually take more responsibility for their own development.

I won’t pre-empt the outcome from developments that the OECD, Estyn and the profession are working on. However, I do expect schools’ self-evaluation to be wide-ranging and to include important areas such the quality of leadership in a school, the quality of teaching and learning, the well-being of pupils, as well as how schools are supporting the four purposes of the curriculum, amongst other areas. This will give us a lot more information about how a school is operating, above and beyond the simple level 2 inclusive score that for too long has masked the performance of too many cohorts of our pupils, in our secondary sector in particular. In terms of the visibility of this information, the outcome of self-evaluation and validation will feature in a three-year school development plan. It is our intention that all schools will publish a summary of its school development plan in order to share that information with parents and with the wider community. This is about providing a more intelligent set of evaluation and improvement arrangements and I'm confident that the peer review and validation processes will do this.

As I mentioned earlier, these arrangements will also apply to other tiers of the system too. I will expect regional consortia to self-evaluate against their agreed business plan and go through an annual peer review with other consortia. The outcome of the self-evaluation will be the development of a three-year action plan, which will be subject to scrutiny and sign-off as part of existing governance arrangements as outlined in the national model for regional working, with Estyn validating the self-evaluation. Consortia will be expected to publish a summary of its action plans annually to share information with its constituent local authorities and schools.

Finally, Deputy Presiding Officer—and I hope Members of this Chamber will welcome this—at a national level, Welsh Government will also self-evaluate against the objectives and actions within our national mission and generate a self-evaluation report. The self-evaluation report will be peer reviewed by members of the Atlantic Rim Collaboratory, which includes leading education systems such as Finland, Ireland and states and provinces in North America. I intend to publish a summary of the self-evaluation and action plan in the form of a Wales education report by the end of this year, and I will further update Members on this work in the coming months.

Thank you. Suzy Davies. 

Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. Can I just say I definitely welcome this statement? Anything that speaks to improvement and the visibility of the improvement in standards is something I'm sure we will all want to hear a little bit more about.

Perhaps I could just ask you to kick off with—you say that we're going to get an update on this again when the curriculum areas of learning and experience are going to be published, which I think is due for April next year. Can you tell us if that's broadly right and, in which case, how difficult it's going to be for the peer review work that you mentioned at the end of your statement there to be produced by the end of the year? It doesn't seem to give them an awful lot of time to get to grips with this new system.

I welcome in particular as well the acknowledgement of the unintended, but, arguably, foreseeable consequences of the existing system that has been overfocusing on that C-D boundary and early entry, both of which were matters we raised in the debate last week. In that debate, we also challenged the assertion that comparisons in standards couldn't be made year on year because—in that case, we were talking about qualifications, but we said that you still can compare, because the Qualifications Wales report had told us that standards were stable. What I'm after, I think, is some assurance that the change in this system won't make it difficult for us to compare findings on improvement or failure to improve in what is to come and what has already been. You already know about our concerns about recategorisation possibly disguising some failures to improve, and, as we've heard with ambulance waiting times, changing rules does just disguise an increasingly worrying constituent experience. We want to avoid us being in that position with these changes, which, as I say, on the face of it, look very welcome. We do have a duty to scrutinise you, and I know I'm new in this post at the moment, but I'm finding it difficult to find points of comparison between the system we have at the moment and the changes you gave us an indication of in your May written statement. So, obviously, I hope to get better at comparing, but if you can give us, as I say, some assurance that we're going to be able to see comparables between this system and the previous—.

Will the evaluation include the effect of emphasis on academic subjects over good-quality vocational offers? I raised this again in the debate last week, where we saw that the drop in the number of entries by weaker students for A-levels obviously improved the statistics for A-levels, whereas an increase in numbers going for GCSE sciences saw an overall drop in the percentage of A to C achievements. So, part of this change is to better evaluate the quality of leadership, and as school management is one of the reasons we had a ruck of warning notices, also referred to in last week's debate, can you tell us that if school leaders, on a per-pupil basis, decide a pupil is better equipped, if you like, to go for a vocational subject rather than an academic subject, or examination, sorry, that this won't affect the school evaluation statistics? Because good leadership is about getting the best out of every pupil, and, of course, academic subjects aren't for everybody.

I'm pleased to see that the evaluation applies to regional consortia and, indeed, Welsh Government. Self-evaluation, of course, may be a characteristic of best practice, but it does come with its own risks, and I seem to remember that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report, going back a couple of years now, identified that schools in Wales tended to be rather overgenerous with themselves when it came to self-evaluation of their performance on discipline. So, I absolutely welcome this idea of peer review, particularly the final comments in your statement. But can I ask whether it allows for an element of—well, I've got 'cross-pollination' written down here, but what I mean by that is: will schools, in evaluating themselves, be allowed to comment on their relationships with school consortia, with schools challenge, even local authorities, maybe even Welsh Government, because these are all relationships that should lead to better school standards? So, I'd like them to have the freedom to be honest about those relationships and, similarly, for those other bodies to have the freedom to be honest about their relationships with certain schools as well.

And then, finally, you mentioned visibility—or maybe comprehensibility is what I'm more interested in, because that whole world of school families and quartiles genuinely may as well been written in Klingon as far as families were concerned. So, even though the OECD may have suggested that assessment of pupil performance is about identifying their strengths and weaknesses in order to help them improve, I think it's realistic to expect families to want to understand how schools as a whole are performing as well. So, how will you be establishing what information matters to families and how that information will be included in the summary of the school development plan? I'm just wondering: is there any space, perhaps, for some guidance on that to run alongside the new evaluation indicators? Because the quality of communications between schools and families is something that's worth evaluating, in my view—maybe not necessarily as part of this, but if there's some way we can incorporate that into what we're looking at in the future, that would be really helpful. Thank you. 

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.

May I thank the Cabinet Secretary for her statement and welcome it too? Clearly, we will want to see the framework and the details when they become available, but I certainly welcome the direction of travel. Very often, we forget—we certainly have done so in the past, perhaps—that we need to trust in our teachers more than perhaps we have done in the past. I've said this in the context of identifying children's ability and potential to make progress and so on and so forth, and I think that the same principle applies here, namely moving to self-evaluation and self-assessment. Plaid Cymru has long since asked for a system of self-improvement where the profession is responsible for their own standards but also where there is an assessment framework in place that is robust and underpins that.

You said in a statement last September that you would publish the new framework for the education system as a whole during the autumn of this year. Clearly, today, now, you have confirmed that you will do that next year. You've touched on this in a previous response, but I would like to understand why we've seen this delay. You referred to the fact that you were linking this process with the introduction of the curriculum, and one can understand the rationale underpinning that, but when will this be fully operational across Wales? What's your aim in terms of getting this framework operational and everyone within the education system being accountable to it? I would be pleased to hear confirmation of that.

You mentioned in your statement that self-evaluation across a number of different areas will be expected, looking at attainment and pupil well-being, the range of the curriculum available, the capacity for improvement, working with other schools and so on and so forth, and all of those are laudable and are to be encouraged, but how will that be considered in the context of the divergences in terms of the resources available to schools? There is inconsistency. We're looking for consistency in assessment, but there is inconsistency in the resources available in terms of delivering the range of the curriculum in certain areas. In certain areas, there are better budgets available, and that will have a direct impact on the subjects schools can offer. So, whilst I believe that the principles are important and that we should have a coherent system—I think that's the word you used—and that they should be consistent across Wales, the context, of course, varies from one area to another, and that may create some conflict within the system.

You're also entirely right in saying that we need to encourage and facilitate sharing good practice, but, again, one of the things that we hear from the sector very often is that there isn't the space and capacity and the slack within the system to release staff members to go and share this good practice, and that, to a certain extent, is acknowledged in the additional resources that you're providing to the flagship schools, in order to enable teachers to go to conferences and share their experiences. So, are there additional resources available in order to implement elements of this framework? Or do you anticipate that there will be some transitional funding for moving from regime to another? I'd be very pleased to hear what the situation is in that regard.

It's great to see that the consortia and the Welsh Government will be accountable to corresponding frameworks. I think that sends an important message to teachers and to the sector as a whole that everyone is not only pulling in the same direction, but that everyone is accountable and is playing to the same rulebook, and it introduces an element of equality, which is a positive message in my view.

I would also ask whether there is an intention to pilot this at the coalface, because we're all eager to see us moving in that direction and it's important that, if it is to happen, it is done properly. You talk about the need to avoid unintended consequences and introducing a coherent approach across Wales; well, I'm sure that an element of piloting, as part of its introduction, would contribute towards that and would be an important contribution in that regard.

Can I thank Llyr for his welcome for the direction of travel? I'm sure we both have been reading and studying the same research and evidence about the power of self-evaluation in driving improvement and the power of a self-improving school system. If we look at international best practice in high-performing countries, trust in the profession but also a strong system of self-evaluation and school-to-school working are crucial in driving an education system forward.

Unfortunately perhaps in some of the ways in which we have had accountability measures in the past, it has worked against that principle of schools sharing good practice. If I'm in a quartile, I need somebody else to be doing worse than me, so why would I share with you my approaches that are working well for me? So, actually, in the past, we have had a system of accountability that perhaps unintentionally has worked against this principle of schools working closely together and raising standards collectively, which, as I said, we know from international evidence, is a strong driver for changing an education system.

With regard to timescales and to the important point that Llyr made about testing, we'll be testing this in the new year, in 2019. You're absolutely right: we need to understand that if the Government pulls this lever, what that means on a day-to-day basis in our schools, and we don't want to create a new set of unintended consequences by the changes that we are making. So, it will be tested. Initially, at the moment, we're sharing some of the thinking with our primary school sector on how it will work in the primary school sector. What's important to note, Llyr, is that this self-evaluation tool is being developed in conjunction with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, so that we have that international rigour and oversight, with Estyn, who will have the job of validating a school's self-evaluation regime, and with the profession itself so that we know that we're coming up with a system that is workable in a school. Because the worst thing that we could do is design a system that, actually, is not practicable for a school to use and to help them drive improvement. So, the profession is involved in the development of it.

But I also think it's important—. I take your point that individual schools and local authorities make different types of funding decisions, but I do think that we need to have a shared understanding across the system about what we mean by self-evaluation and we're looking at the same factors in each of our schools. Again, the things that we would be expecting to see delivered as part of the framework would be its effectiveness as a learning organisation, how it's demonstrating how it can move things forward, the effectiveness of its school improvement processes, crucially on the impact on the pupils. Why are we doing this? What's the point of doing any of this if your improvement isn't going to lead to better outcomes and a more positive impact on your school pupils? Progress and achievement around the curriculum itself clearly, but also looking at the issue of well-being.

We've had many debates in this Chamber recently about the need for a whole-school approach. We have to have a more sophisticated way about how we hold schools to account for the issue of well-being. At its worst, well-being is about, 'Have the children turned up?' and if they have, 'Well, there we are, we're addressing well-being.' We know, from the work that the committee has done, that we have to be much more sophisticated at looking at how we address well-being. We need a whole-school approach. We also know that schools do what they will be evaluated on, so this has to be an important part of the self-evaluation framework as we go forward.

You're right: one of the challenges, Llyr, is creating time for all of this to happen. In the first instance, you correctly identified that we are providing resources for pioneer schools to be able to undertake this work. We will be looking to resource new professional development learning opportunities that facilitate people going to and from different schools. So, this will need to be resourced and, in the longer term, that's why we commissioned Mick Waters to do the report that you yourself mentioned earlier on in questions to the leader of the house, because that talks about how we can begin to think about how we can make these things a possibility in the constraints of a very busy working life for a teacher. And I will be looking to respond fully to that report once we've had the opportunity to digest everything that's within it, but I was very heartened that you found it a very interesting and stimulating read, and that provides a blueprint for how some of these issues can be addressed in the longer term in a more sustainable way, rather than constantly having to put pots of money together to make these things happen.

Thank you for your statement, Cabinet Secretary. Self-evaluation is an important internal exercise, but when used in this context, where it will form part of a larger evaluation and assessment process, and where schools operate under a funding model that sees schools competing for pupils, will the self-evaluation of schools and consortia simply end up being an exercise in self-promotion? I know that you say that the self-evaluation will be validated externally, but if that is the case, if it will be subject to external validation and evaluation, why bother with the self-evaluation in the first place, and not just leave the matter to external bodies such as Estyn? And from a practical point of view, what will validation mean in reality, and how will Estyn actually go about validating self-evaluations of consortia and schools? I would be really, really interested to hear how you foresee that working, Cabinet Secretary. 

The schools should already be self-evaluating for their own use, so this idea that the evaluation should become public, in a sense, will surely risk what previously might have been an honest evaluation becoming one spun in order to attract more pupils. Is this really the correct move considering the funding model, and would the Cabinet Secretary favour a changed funding model that would suit this evaluation scheme better?

Turning to the peer review of both schools and regional consortia's self-evaluations, how do you foresee that working in practice? What is the intended output of the peer review? And given that both regional consortia and schools will be effectively checking each other's homework, how can you ensure that standards will be improved as a result? Thank you.

I believe that there is a huge amount of value to be placed on an internal exercise that looks at the strengths and the weaknesses of an individual institution and, more importantly, what steps are going to be taken to make that institution better. We know, from all the international evidence and research, that schools as learning organisations are a feature of high-performing education systems, and that's what I want for the children of Wales. But we also know that self-evaluation does need to have an element of peer review. That's why we will have schools working together to provide that. Not only does it provide an excellent opportunity to verify an internal exercise, it promotes the spirit of collaboration between our schools—something that we have not been good at in our system in the past, and we need to improve upon. And that was one of the features of the OECD report into the Welsh education system.

The validation will be carried out by Estyn. The Member says maybe we should just leave all of this to Estyn, but, realistically, the inspection cycle would leave huge gaps when Estyn would be able to get to a school. This will be an annual process that will be undertaken, and therefore we can have real live time. One of the problems of our current inspection system is that a school can go many, many, many years before Estyn comes back to inspect that school again. And, you know, for better or for worse, an inspection report can become out of date quite quickly. I know of schools that have moved immeasurably in a short period of time, and also we have schools that have done well, and there's lots of evidence of this across the border in England, where a school has done well and then, after inspection, performance and standards drop immediately because the threat of an inspection report isn't due for years and years' time. So, actually, this gives us a much better, and a much more robust, system where these things are being constantly looked at and challenged.

I have no plans to change the current model of education funding, but, of course, I will look at every opportunity to maximise school budgets and maximise the amount of investment that the Welsh Government can put into our education system.

Thank you very much, Cabinet Secretary.