Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:22 pm on 28 June 2022.
Well, I'm always very diffident when I approach questions of teaching and learning with someone who is a teaching professional, so I'll just give that caveat, if I may, and an element of deference, I suppose, about what I'm about to say. But I think that point about the individual learner's journey is fundamental, and, in some ways, is perhaps the most radical part of the whole suite of reforms that we're introducing in different areas because it takes away, doesn't it, that externally accessed time point where a particular level of progress is deemed to have been reached or not, and recognises that each learner is on their own journey and will need different kinds of support and challenge, actually, at different points in their journey. I think that's very exciting. It's also, obviously, quite a challenging step change, isn't it, so I absolutely recognise that, and I know the Member will have been aware of the resources that in the last year in particular have been made available to schools so that there's that shared understanding of how to assess and how to define progression. And, as I was saying in my opening statement, that new obligation on schools to engage outside their clusters, if you like, to make sure there's that moderated system-wide understanding of what progression is, is, I think, a really important part of this.
But whether it's through—. Well, there's a range of data available to measure on a system-wide basis and in the life of an individual student how they're progressing, and I think one of the—. She talked about the attainment gap; I think one of the most transformative aspects, I think, of the new curriculum, will be that it really allows us to engage learners who perhaps in other circumstances might be a bit less engaged than we would wish them to be just because of the creativity at the heart of the curriculum, that you take a subject matter that may be familiar to the individual student and you take them on a journey of engagement and discovery, and I think that really holds the key to helping us to do much more in terms of closing the attainment gap to which she referred.