Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:07 pm on 8 January 2019.
Could I begin by thanking Suzy Davies for that series of questions? First of all, can I say that the Member referred to the assessments on a number of occasions in her contribution as 'tests'? These are not tests; they are assessments. There is a difference between a high-stakes test and an assessment that is used for the purposes of informing teaching and learning going forward.
If I might say, there is a slight contradiction in the issues that the Member raised. On one hand, the Member said that she would want to see the results of these tests being made publicly available. What we do know is that it is exactly creating a high-stakes public accountability around assessment that has led to some of the concerns about the quality of teachers' own self-assessment. If they feel that these assessments are going to be used to publicly assess their abilities as an individual teacher or in a school, there is the human temptation—there is human temptation—not to do that correctly.
So, the issue here is—we have to be clear—these are not tests. These are assessments that are there to assess where a child is in their learning, to be able to provide feedback to that child and, yes, crucially, to parents. Suzy, I couldn't agree with you more: I'm sure all of us who have been parents in the system have been aware of that envelope coming home on the very last week of term with previous test scores in it, leaving parents no time to have the opportunity to go back into school and discuss with the classroom teacher the results of those tests.
The great thing about these tests is that they are tailor-made for individual children. No two children's tests will be exactly the same, because the questions that will be asked will be responding to their ability to answer them. The results will be instantaneous, and those results will be available to parents within a day or two of that child taking the test.
The Member asks how often the children will take the test. You're absolutely right: Graham Donaldson did say that frequency of testing should be kept to a minimum, but Donaldson also recommended an innovative approach to assessment, including interactive approaches. So, actually, we've taken on board the advice of Graham Donaldson, and it will be up to individual classroom teachers to decide when a child should take a test, or take an assessment—I'm doing it now—and how frequent that assessment could be, because it could be the decision of a teacher that this assessment is carried out at different points in the year to feed back on whether progress has been made, but that is left to the discretion of the individual classroom teacher knowing those children the best.
Again, the good thing about this system is rather than all schools having to do the test within a week's period at the same time of the year, this is allowing the individual teachers to decide when best to employ this strategic tool to assist their children. But, of course, it is just one part of assessing where a child is and self-evaluation will continue to be, and teacher evaluation will continue to be, a very important part of our education system. At present, Estyn are working with practitioners and schools and the OECD to develop a self-evaluation toolkit so that schools become much, much better at understanding how they are performing and what they're delivering in their school is impacting on their learners. And it is that self-evaluation that will become the bedrock of our accountability system.
We are working with Estyn to look at the prospect of Estyn accrediting schools' self-evaluation. If Estyn are convinced that a school is doing this correctly and properly, then they will be, in a way, licensed to carry on to do that for a number of years. If Estyn has concerns—if Estyn are not convinced about the school's ability to self-evaluate—it could result in more frequent visits from Estyn to a particular school. So, self-evaluation will become one of the core principles of how we actually hold schools accountable for their performance, but that is not the same as using individual children's data and individual children's performance, because that leads us into the conundrum I've talked about earlier about high-stakes tests.
With regard to professional development, you'll be aware that money has been made available both in this year, which has gone out via consortia, and for the next financial year, which will be used in conjunction with our partners in local government. The consortia will be reporting back on how that money has been used to support professional learning and, of course, all of our consortia are subject to Estyn inspection and ongoing review by Welsh Government itself.
With regard to infrastructure, obviously the £1.7 million has been given to the WLGA, and they as a group of local authorities are working out how best that they want to distribute that money. That's just one part of the investment that we are making in IT infrastructure. We continue to work to ensure that all schools are connected to superfast broadband and are able to receive superfast broadband speeds. So, that is the infrastructure outside the school, and we continue to work with our partners in local government to understand some of the constraints within local government's own systems and individual schools systems that mean that they can't avail themselves of the opportunity of those speeds if the fibre has been connected. And we will continue to work with our Learning in Digital Wales programme to look at ongoing investments to support schools and local authorities to ensure that all of our institutions have broadband speeds and technology within their school that will meet the needs, not just for the ability to deliver online adaptive assessments, but also the curriculum as a whole.