It's absolutely clear to me, Dirprwy Lywydd, that using a wide range of information is crucial to supporting evaluation and improvement. Isolated pieces of data, or out of context, should not be used to judge performance or compare schools. I welcome Estyn’s response to my written statement last week, confirming that they too will not be looking to use isolated pieces of information to assess school improvement or for accountability.

Equally, any requirements on schools to provide information should have a clear purpose. That purpose is, at its centre, to help teachers support learning. Information about how learners are progressing, and the progression of different cohorts in different contexts, should help schools and local authorities evaluate themselves and improve their own offer, with the support of school improvement services. We must, though, not forget the crucial importance of parents and the need for transparency of information to enable them to take decisions on their child’s education and engage with their child’s school.

The report will help us in developing our reformed approach to information to support school improvement. To ensure that we clearly put learners and teachers at the centre, my officials will be convening a practitioners group to begin to develop the new information landscape in the context of the report’s recommendations. While different parts of Wales might have different needs, there are fundamental issues that should be all of our focus. The eight factors that support curriculum realisation, set out in the school improvement guidance, embed these core national priorities.

It will not come as a surprise to the Chamber that I am absolutely clear that there must be a particular focus on improving the progress of our most disadvantaged learners. As well as learners and teachers, I will be listening to the voices of parents, to ensure that the information they receive best helps them to understand their children's educational experience. We'll be looking to streamline and promote consistency in information approaches across schools and across Wales. A more coherent and simpler approach will require us all to work together in partnership. It will require compromise and, sometimes, hard decisions to stop asking for some information where it does not support learners and teachers. But we must grasp this opportunity. 

On understanding how learners are achieving nationally, whether we are achieving our objective of raising standards across Wales is a key part of this information landscape, crucial to informing our support to schools and for transparency and confidence in the system. To support this, I've taken the decision that we will introduce an ambitious programme of national monitoring to assess knowledge and skills across the breadth of the Curriculum for Wales. This is not about testing every learner. Instead, we will take a sampling approach to understand and monitor learners' attainment and progress over time at a system level. This approach will minimise burdens on schools and the education system as a whole, help provide the information we need to understand our progress as a nation and help us better understand the impact of poverty on learners' achievement and support our approaches to tackling this. We plan to begin rolling out these sample assessments on a pilot basis in the 2025-26 academic year.

Dirprwy Lywydd, finally, achieving qualifications remains vitally important for learners and will remain a priority for this Government. In 2019, we introduced new transitional interim measures for secondary schools that ensured more focus on raising our aspirations for all learners with indicators that better captured the achievement of all our learners at key stage 4. These measures, as Members will be aware, were paused during the pandemic. For an interim period, we will restart the reporting of key stage 4 outcomes at school level, including the policy of counting only first award of qualifications. This is temporary, as we move towards a more holistic system that promotes learning and puts learners, teachers and parents at the centre. It will not apply to learners now learning under the Curriculum for Wales.

I'm committed to working in partnership with schools to develop a new information landscape, including on qualifications information, ready for the new GCSEs from 2025, and I plan to provide further updates to the Siambr as this work progresses.