Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:56 pm on 25 June 2019.

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Photo of Mark Reckless Mark Reckless Conservative 1:56, 25 June 2019

But if you don't publish the results, if you treat league tables as a dirty phrase, if you tell each school to measure what they like and hold themselves to account, how are parents possibly going to judge what schools are delivering and make decisions about where they want their children to go to school? The fact is that accountability measures in Wales—. Let's take primary schools, Kirsty Williams. We discussed this two or three years ago when I said that the measures available to compare primary schools were far less than they were in England, and you rightly pointed out to me that, actually, since 2014, Estyn had increased that accountability and had put the levels 4 and 5 for key stage 2 onto its report. Unfortunately, since at least late 2017, that, once again, appears to have stopped happening, and the accountability measures have gone backwards.

So, people increasingly fall back on the Programme for International Student Assessment, where the comparisons are absolutely awful. We are well below the average on all three of the comparators, where England is above it. We are 478 on maths, 490 is the average and it's 493 for England. On reading, we're on 477, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average is 493, and it's 500 in England—and similarly on maths. Is it not the case that, under Liberal Democrat leadership, education in Wales has deteriorated further? It is harder and harder for anyone to call it to account because you won't publish the information to allow them to do so. Is it not a risk that things will deteriorate even further, because Kirsty Williams is letting schools mark their own homework?