5. Statement by the Minister for Education and Welsh Language: School Improvement and the Information Landscape

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:50 pm on 24 January 2023.

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Photo of Jeremy Miles Jeremy Miles Labour 4:50, 24 January 2023

I thank the Member for that question. On the second point, I'm very clear that we need to move to a more standardised way of doing that, and that's absolutely one of the priorities that I'll want to see taken forward in our response to both the social finance report and the Arad Research work as well. I think that's a really important part of that.

In relation to the national monitoring proposal, there is a—. Both the Arad Research and the social finance work have highlighted the need to understand, better than we do, across the system, the questions in relation to attainment and progress. As we phase out the end-of-key-stage assessments, that becomes, obviously, even more important. Obviously, only some schools and learners will be involved in the assessments. The point of that is that they don't unduly determine schools' individual approaches to curriculum design, and keep the burdens on schools to a minimum. So, it's a system-wide picture that we are looking for. It'll be designed in a way that aligns very closely with that broader information ecosystem that I was talking about. That will be developed by the practitioner group that I was talking about in my earlier statement. So, the role of school leaders and practitioners in designing this ecosystem and the monitoring system that sits within it will be absolutely essential. I want to make sure that we will be able to understand how different groups of learners are achieving, what further national support we need to provide to the system where individual groups of learners, cohorts of learners, learners defined by particular characteristics, for example, might be needing additional support. And I think the point the Member ended with there, in relation to well-being and how we respond to questions of disadvantage, will be an important—. That'll be very important data for us to capture as part of that national monitoring programme.