Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Education – in the Senedd at 2:50 pm on 25 November 2020.
Well, Laura, you are absolutely right—it is the priority of this Government to minimise the interruption to children's education in the light of this pandemic. Undoubtedly, there has been a significant impact on schools at this time, but, as Estyn has confirmed, there remains a great deal of enthusiasm and support for curriculum reform, and they also advise that important gains have been made by schools in their planning and provision of learning. Now, clearly, you're also correct to say that a lot of this depends on the skills of our teachers, and certainly the professional development programme has had to be delivered in a different way than perhaps we had initially expected. But, as I said, those days when professional learning was delivered by everybody trekking to Cardiff to sit in a lecture theatre, to listen to the sage on the stage, and then they promptly went back to the schools and ignored everything that they'd heard that day—. We have to do things differently, and we are doing things differently, and actually, again, speaking to headteachers, the fact that we've had to move all of our meetings online means that they are now able to collaborate in a way that keeps them in their schools and allows them to connect more readily, and because we've taken some of the paperwork off schools at this time, it is giving them an opportunity to really engage in the new curriculum.