Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:22 pm on 28 January 2020.
Thank you very much, Minister, for a very comprehensive statement on the journey so far. Can I offer my thanks to everybody else involved in what looks like, certainly, an enormous amount of hard work? I've explained before that the Welsh Conservatives have long argued that we should let teachers teach, and some of the changes already have our in-principle support. That goes hand in hand with our heads-up, if you like, on looking for greater information on what scrutiny will look like in future accountability and measurability—aspects that I'm sure we'll come back to in some more detail on another day.
Personally, I hope that we move away from this atmosphere of having to sit 13 or 14 GCSEs, or at least year 11 exams, in order to prove your excellence. There comes a point where you can be asked to do too much, when we look at it in these terms. If we are to avoid teaching to the exam, and I hope we are all on that page, we still will need to find a way for pupils to demonstrate their attainment across this broader curriculum, and again, I suspect that's something we'll come back to.
My first question is about the point that you made, Minister, about implementation—the deliverability and what that looks like at this stage of development. We're having to wait 18 months or so for some pretty key frameworks on guidance, not least on the more sensitive areas of the curriculum, which doesn't give practitioners or the range of co-constructors—'co-producers' I still prefer to call them—time to get to grips with this by the time it gets to 2022. So I'm wondering if you can give us some steer on why you think, bearing in mind the enormous amount of work that's already gone into this, that we're having to wait quite so long for detailed frameworks and guidance on those more sensitive areas.
Populating the curriculum with material still remains, of course, a core challenge at this point of development. The guidelines, such as they are, are helpful, and I'm not saying that they're not, but inevitably existing teachers I suspect will still be relying on their body of knowledge, and even some of their resources that they already have, to decide what they're going to do when they go into school on a Monday morning and have to stand up in front of a class of year 7. I think, by the sound of it, that it's the secondary schools that are going to find this change more of a challenge, if I can put it like that.