Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer.

Deputy Presiding Officer, pupil assessments' prime purpose must be to provide information that guides decisions about how best to progress learning, and to provide information to the learner, to the teacher and to parents and carers. Therefore, assessment should improve learners’ learning, teachers’ teaching and parents’ understanding.

I am pleased to report that we are successfully moving forward with the transition from paper-based reading and numeracy tests that learners sit each year to online, adaptive, personalised assessments. Starting with procedural numeracy, they will replace paper tests completely by 2021, and, in the term before Christmas, we began the phasing-in of these assessments.

High-quality, ongoing assessment has a crucial role in teaching, learning and raising standards, but the current system of paper-based testing has its limitations. The new assessments have flexibility and adaptability built into them, so learners will be presented with questions that match and challenge their skills levels.

In turn, this means that teachers will have much richer information and will be able to gear lessons more specifically to help learners improve. These assessments have been designed to support the fundamental shift of our new curriculum, and both are built on the concept of progression. The curriculum will offer teachers more freedom to teach in a way that best meets the needs of each of their pupils, and the new assessments will tell them clearly what those needs are.

We want to provide teachers with the tools for sustained improvement in teaching and learning and we want this to be flexible, an approach to assessment that is formative and provides feedback on skills and strengths, areas that they need to work on and next steps. This type of ongoing, quality assessment is crucial in raising standards across the board and to help us to deliver on our national mission.

And we have the support of the profession for this type of assessment. The practitioners we have worked with in the development stages saw the new assessment tools as a powerful way to move pupils on in their learning. We know that learners who are given high-quality feedback, who understand where they are in their learning and where they need to go next, and crucially how to get there, are the most likely to make the most improvement.

The system has been designed very much with the needs of schools and teachers in mind too. Assessments can be scheduled at a time that works best for the school. This is about putting control in the hands of the teachers who can decide what is best for them and their learners, and also in the numbers that work best for the school too—pupils can be assessed individually or in small groups.

We have not designed these assessments in isolation. We have learned from the best with an expert group, including representation from Denmark and the Netherlands, providing advice throughout. This has enabled us to lead the way. Adaptive assessments for procedural numeracy and reading have been developed elsewhere, but Wales is the first nation to develop online assessment for numerical reasoning skills.

Deputy Presiding Officer, Members will know that since entering Government I have sought to tackle the issue of access to IT and broadband. We have provided the WLGA with an additional £1.7 million to distribute to schools who are in most need of an IT upgrade. We will be providing ongoing help as these assessments are rolled out, support materials will be available online, we will be holding webinars to ensure that schools understand the process and how they can use the reports.

So, personalised assessments, Deputy Presiding Officer, provide a tailored, interactive experience to engage learners, to assess the level of their skills and will offer immediate, high-quality feedback, supporting both teachers and pupils in their development. So, in conclusion, this is an exciting and necessary development for raising standards and reducing the attainment gap.