4. Statement by the Minister for Education: Update on Qualifications for 2021

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:57 pm on 26 January 2021.

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Photo of Jenny Rathbone Jenny Rathbone Labour 3:57, 26 January 2021

Thank you very much for your detailed statement. We're both of the female species, so obviously we're not unfamiliar with the concept of discrimination, so I just want to address the challenges that any system faces in addressing gender, ethnicity, physical appearance, prior learning difficulty, that consciously or subconsciously, any human being is capable of making. We've got lots of research to back all that up, and we also know that some schools are much better at accurately predicting attainment based on under- or over-predicting what they were going to do in exams and then—. And all of this, of course, is very important to get right, to ensure we are challenging students and teachers effectively.

So, I'm very pleased to see that you're endeavouring as far as possible to get a design and delivery advisory group to own the challenges that this is bound to throw up, so that we can ensure not just that all our centres of learning are endeavouring to overcome these sorts of problems, but also that we've got external people ensuring, where those checks and balances are inadequate, that we've got adequate ways of providing against that bias, so that we're not having mountains of appeals, which cause so much grief to young people. I wonder if you could just say a little bit more about how successful you think you're going to be, to really tie the profession into addressing what are genuine problems.