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.