15
Examination of witnesses
Professor Graham Donaldson, Gareth Evans and Professor Gordon Stobart.
Q92 The Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to this evidence session of the Education for 11-16 Year Olds Committee. I thank our witnesses for appearing before us today. I remind you that there will be a transcript taken of the session and there will be an opportunity to correct it later, if you need to. Could I ask you briefly, please, each to introduce yourself and to say what your organisation does? Thank you.
Professor Gordon Stobart: I am an emeritus professor from the Institute of Education, UCL. My role here is that I did an OECD report on the Scottish examination system a year or two ago, so it is bringing some of that forward. My interest is in a comparative approach to assessment systems, having worked as a teacher, an educational psychologist and a government official. I have meandered through education for about 30 years, and picked up bits here and there.
Gareth Evans: Good afternoon, and thank you for the invitation. I am director of education policy at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and leader of the Centre for Education Policy Review and Analysis. My potential strength this afternoon will be that I work with some 200 schools in a variety of different capacities, from curriculum design and professional learning to research in the classroom, and I have written extensively on education in Wales since devolution. I am very much looking forward to a rich conversation this afternoon.
Professor Graham Donaldson: Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to meet with the committee. I am at an age now when I tend to talk more about what I did rather than what I currently do. I was head of the inspectorate and chief inspector in Scotland from 2003 to 2010, and in that context I was very actively involved in the curriculum reform process that took place in Scotland at that time. Subsequently, I have been working at the University of Glasgow. I am an honorary professor there at the moment. Perhaps more significantly, in 2014 I was asked by the Welsh Government to undertake a review of the national curriculum and assessment arrangements in Wales, and that led to a report called Successful Futures, which gave 68 recommendations that were all accepted by the Government in Wales following consultation. The major reform programme that has been under way in Wales since then derives from that work.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
Q93 Baroness Garden of Frognal: Thank you very much for being with us. Can you tell us what led to the current programme of education reforms being undertaken in Wales and the recent reviews of the education system in Scotland? What do the current or likely reforms of these systems seek to achieve? How are you hoping to improve the systems?
Gareth Evans: Maybe I should take that question given my specific interest in Wales. It is important to go back in time a bit to give a little context to the current reform programme. Wales has been through what can be described, I suppose, as a tumultuous period of reform dating back probably 15 years to the PISA results of 2009-10. Wales performed particularly poorly—and continues to perform particularly poorly, as the committee probably well knows—across PISA international comparators: reading, science and maths.
So then started a raft of what I would describe as piecemeal reform—sticking plasters, if you like. There were introductions of accountability and a new focus on standards, national reading and numeracy tests were reinstated rather like the SATs that we used to have and you still have in England, and there was national school categorisation, which is akin to league tables. There was a whole host of new performative measures that were driving particular behaviours around raising standards across the system.
Two or three years later, PISA landed again. Sorry for labouring this a little, but it is important. PISA did not show any noticeable improvement for Wales, and because of that the Welsh Government invited the OECD, in 2014, to review its education system. The OECD found a number of things that I think are the root of our current reform agenda. It found a system struggling with reform fatigue, as it called it; a teaching profession that had become overburdened and frustrated by the amount of change; and, most important of all, a system that lacked a clear vision for education.
The Welsh Government, to their credit, went away and responded in kind and created a much different system. It was chalk and cheese really, almost a U-turn on the performative-based accountability system that I described. Underpinning the whole thing was a new curriculum, as Professor Donaldson has already mentioned and no doubt we will discuss further shortly. The Welsh Government noticed that curriculum alone would not suffice and could not be done in isolation, so there was a look at the wider ecosystem of education in Wales and the climate of education, and everything changed. It was a whole-system reform underpinned by the curriculum but not restricted in any way to it, involving professional learning and new approaches to accountability and assessment. Just about everything in education in Wales changed, and is changing. Gone was the piecemeal approach of old. This was whole-system reform involving every key component of our system—government, school, the so-called middle tier of regional consortia and local government. Universities were very much involved.
A very long-winded answer to your very straightforward question is that the curriculum and the reform programmes seek to do two things, fundamentally. The first is to reposition the place of the learner in education. We had lost sight of what really mattered. Schools had become too interested and too wound up in accountability, teaching to the test and playing the game, at the expense sometimes of individual learner journeys. Second to that, in doing the whole-system change, the curriculum was not done to the teaching profession in Wales—I hope we get a chance to talk about that a little further—it was done very much in co-construction and collaboratively, involving all the players I spoke about earlier. The profession in Wales has had a very central part in the current reform programme.
So the two things are re-emphasis on the learner, and re-engaging, reinvigorating and really giving the profession a new lease of life. There is a lot going on and there are numerous challenges, but there is also a huge opportunity.
Baroness Garden of Frognal: Thank you very much.
Lord Baker of Dorking: Did you change the assessment system as well?
Gareth Evans: The assessment system is changing.
Lord Baker of Dorking: What is the assessment system?
Gareth Evans: The assessment of learners rather than the system? Assessment of the learner will now be made against progression steps within the new curriculum. There are certain steps now. There is a progression code. Learners must demonstrate progress through the curriculum and teachers must evidence that in order to be accountable to the Government and to their elected governing bodies. Beyond that, the system now is very much looking at sampling of schools in the accountability structure. Fundamental is that there has been a disaggregation of assessment of the learner for the learner’s benefit and assessment of the learner for the system’s benefit. There is no longer by standard a publication of attainment outcomes.
Lord Baker of Dorking: Starting at 11, are the children assessed regularly at 12, 13, 14 and 15? Are records kept of that?
Gareth Evans: Yes, in the new world they are teacher assessed.
The Chair: We will come to assessment shortly, Lord Baker. Professor Donaldson, do you want to come in?
Professor Graham Donaldson: Yes, I have just a couple of things to elaborate on what Gareth said. When I undertook the review in 2014-15, it was very evident very quickly in the review that there was a loss of confidence in Welsh education, which was very obvious as I spoke to staff, young people, parents and employers as part of that review. Fundamentally, there was a failure to identify the purpose. Why do young people go to school? What are we trying to achieve through young people being at school? The curriculum had simply become a treadmill of trying to overtake what had been prescribed through the national curriculum.
Successful Futures reimagined the curriculum through four broad purposes: lifelong learning; the nature of the ability to apply that learning; the way in which young people developed as ethical and informed citizens, a particularly important part of the new curriculum and often pushed to the margins in what happened previously; and health, well-being and confidence. The nature of the proposal in Successful Futures was to completely reimagine the nature of the curriculum in delivering on those four purposes.
The other half of the report was about the kinds of things that Gareth was talking about. There is no point in changing the curriculum and being aspirational about the curriculum if you do not take account of professional learning and build the capacity of teachers to be able to realise that curriculum. If you have an accountability system that values different things from the new curriculum, you clearly have to rethink accountability. You have to think about leadership in the context of that new curriculum.
The programme in Wales, in my experience, is probably the most comprehensive educational reform programme that I have come across. It recognises that if you want to achieve a new curriculum, you have to treat it as an interlocking set of reforms that are all designed to reinforce the fundamental purposes of school education.
The Chair: Great. Thank you very much.
Q94 Lord Aberdare: My question is about the strengths and weaknesses of assessment methods. I am very interested in the fact that you seem to be decoupling, in a sense, assessment from accountability. One of the strengths of the GCSE system is that it gives you a very direct line to accountability, but you may be accounting for the wrong things. I would be very interested to know more about how that works or is intended to work in Wales. How do you measure against the four broad purposes that Professor Donaldson mentioned? How do you get from there to an accountability system?
Specifically, we have read about the adaptive testing approach, the use of technology—I think digital first was mentioned somewhere—the skills challenge certificate, and the Capped 9 measure. It would be helpful to get my mind around how a whole lot of things relate to each other and produce an overall assessment system that in the end measures those four purposes. Obviously, Gareth Evans has something to say on that.
Gareth Evans: I will take that first, then. Thank you, Lord Aberdare, for the question. My memory is not so good; I will try to cover as much as I can. To pick up on Lord Baker’s question earlier as well, assessment for learning, as you mentioned in your question, is fundamental to the new approach, with teachers being given the autonomy and independence to develop their own assessment systems.
There is no longer a standard assessment system across the entire education system in Wales because every curriculum will be slightly nuanced. There is a framework curriculum for Wales, as Professor Donaldson will tell you, but it is not set in stone and it does not prescribe content as the old national curriculum did. Every curriculum will have an element of difference and will be developed by design in its local context for the benefit of its own learners, so teachers will have to assemble an assessment process around that.
They will have to demonstrate how it supports their learners to progress. They will have to demonstrate that to their governing body, to the inspectorate and to their local authority or regional consortia—the middle tier between government and school—and advisers will come in periodically to check that they are doing those things. Schools will now have to present school development plans on an annual basis and publish them, so that is a form of accountability, rowing back from the more pernicious, performative, high-stakes accountability that you referred to—the Capped 9, the Progress 8, the Level 2-plus as we used to know it.
As Professor Donaldson says, schools were doing things for perhaps the wrong reasons, and we are trying very much in Wales to remove ourselves from that, to pull away from it and allow the new curriculum to flourish, and every individual learner to benefit and develop in a way that is befitting of their own needs, because at the moment we do not think that our one-size-fits-all standardised approach in Wales serves our learners well enough. We are, I think it is fair to say, being fairly radical. It is relatively new. Not many other countries are doing it. I cannot give you a straight answer as in, “This is going to work. This is a silver bullet. This is what I would fundamentally recommend”. We are optimistic that it is going to work. The conditions that I mentioned earlier are in place to allow it to work, but I suppose time will tell. I will hand over to Gordon.
Lord Baker of Dorking: Do you still have GCSEs at 16?
Gareth Evans: We do, and that is a very important observation. Qualifications are changing to align with the curriculum. A potential issue there is that the qualification system has not yet changed. GCSEs will remain, but they are under consultation, so we are in a halfway house at the moment where we want teachers and schools to jump wholeheartedly into the new world, but there is reluctance, in secondaries in particular, to do so because the GCSEs of old are still in situ. Qualifications Wales, our exam regulator in Wales, is consulting now on future content and future make-up of GCSEs. We will see what that looks like and how they will be delivered, but there is no doubt that they will be very different from the GCSEs taken in England.
Q95 Lord Lexden: Could I ask about the position in Scotland? We have heard most usefully and interestingly about Wales, but I wonder if we could move, for a while anyway, to Scotland with Professor Donaldson and Professor Stobart to hear about the progress of reform in Scotland.
Professor Graham Donaldson: I can say a little bit about the background to what has been happening in Scotland. Interestingly, when the Scottish Parliament was set up in 1999, one of the first things that it did was to sponsor a national debate about education, which was partly a response to growing concerns around a curriculum that was becoming overcrowded and too prescriptive, and there were worries about the relevance of that curriculum. There was a major debate in 2002, and that in due course led to a very substantial curriculum reform, which is echoed in what is happening in Wales. Wales takes the story on very substantially.
The Scottish curriculum reform that took place in the first decade of this century was about thinking differently about the nature of the curriculum. It was not about simply what children have learned. The fundamental of the curriculum was about what happens as a result of that learning—what young people can do and become as a result of the learning that has taken place in school. The focus is on saying that, of course, what is learned through the formal process remains of vital importance, but it is not enough; you have to think about the role of the school in building young people as people, and that was the essence of the reform in Scotland that took place at that time.
The story has moved on. In Scotland, we are currently in a process where there is a pretty major reappraisal or rethinking of the nature of Scottish school education. There has been a so-called national discussion that again has suggested that there is an appetite for further change in the Scottish context, not actually resiling from the original curriculum and its purposes but thinking very hard about the nature of the way in which that curriculum can be realised and practised in schools.
The Scottish story is one that has run through the first 20 years of this century, and it would be true to say that at the moment Scotland is at a crossroads about where it might go. A report has been commissioned and undertaken by Professor Hayward on qualifications in Scotland. That will be a very important report, which the Minister will be launching, I think before the end of the parliamentary session, and it will send very powerful signals about the nature of the way in which the Scottish reform programme will move on.
Lord Baker of Dorking: How is it going to move on? Which way is it going?
The Chair: Professor Stobart wants to come in.
Professor Gordon Stobart: To follow up on Graham’s points, I was drafted in by OECD to Scotland to review the exam system, partly because it did a big review of the Scottish curriculum, which it does every 10 years. One of its findings was that, once you get to secondary school, the examination system takes over and the curriculum for excellence, which is looked at as very forward looking—it was ahead of its time when it was issued and is a model for many other countries—falls away because you are following syllabuses in subjects.
Perhaps it is worth noting—it was a bit of a surprise to me—that Scotland has three tiers of examinations at 16 onwards. You take one each year for three years if you are going through the system. Here we have the GCSE and A-level, but in Scotland there are different exams each year. So we had what was called the two-term dash—you finish your National 5 and immediately start your Higher—and then you are on advanced Higher if you stay in the system. The OECD concluded that it washes out the curriculum for excellence because it is so exam-dominated. I was asked to review it and did so from a comparative point of view. I looked at 10 other exam systems around the world to see what they did.
I would make a couple of points. One is that Wales is not out of kilter with a lot of other countries in the curriculum giving teachers far more responsibility and trying to diminish the accountability system rather than letting it dominate what goes on in the classroom. Internationally, there is curriculum reform everywhere and still the same struggle of how we align assessment with that so that we actually assess what we claim we are teaching and learning.
I have one more observation, which Lord Baker will be familiar with. As I looked around the world, the British system was the outlier. We are embedded in it, so we think, “This is how you do it”, and we have done it for so long.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: Do you mean the English system?
Professor Gordon Stobart: No, the British system—Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Which major assessment systems have examinations at 16? Very few. At 16, you start building towards the assessment at 18, so with a separate suite of exams at 16 we are out of kilter with the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and France. If we can look at it from that bigger perspective, we probably have an elephant in the room, which is: do we need exams at 16?
Lord Baker of Dorking: That was very clear.
Q96 Lord Knight of Weymouth: I have a sequence, so bear with me. Starting with you, Gareth, how much did Wales learn from Scotland and the process that we have just heard described?
Gareth Evans: To some extent. I think we learned the value of co-construction. I think we understood that reform of this type could not be done in a piecemeal way—we had to do everything together so that it was all coherent, and it joined up and aligned. Maybe where we fell short in hindsight is that we left qualifications a bit too late. Maybe qualifications should have been developed in tandem with the curriculum, because, as I mentioned earlier, we are in a peculiar halfway house now where schools, particularly secondary schools, are reluctant to jump fully into the new curriculum for Wales because they are still being measured, despite what I said earlier. Capped 9 is a performance measure and is still in place. It will go, we are promised it will go, but it is still in place I think because the new system has not fully transformed yet. We have not learned our lesson necessarily on qualifications.
Another thing that we kind of tried to learn from Scotland but I do not think we got particularly right was the need to support our teaching profession in making the transition. I remember well talking to colleagues from Scotland when all the transformation began, probably the best part of a decade ago, and they warned me that one of the big problems was the sheer volume of new guidance, information and support teachers were getting chucked at them. They were completely overwhelmed. A colleague once described it as a fearsome hydra that kept spawning new heads.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: I assume Wales has the same recruitment and retention problems that we have in England.
Gareth Evans: Absolutely, it does. On that particular point, I would like to think that we are well placed to address some of those concerns because of the new autonomy and trust we are placing in our profession.
Just quickly on the professional learning thing, the issue in Wales was that, because of the lesson or instruction we had had from Scotland not to keep writing guidance rather like the old prescriptive curriculum, we held back and did not give them enough. At the moment, one of the main criticisms I am getting of government from colleagues in schools is, “Please help. We need more support”.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: Professor Donaldson, imagine for a moment that you are a new Secretary of State for Education in England and you have committed to reviewing the curriculum for English schools. How much would you want to learn from Scotland and Wales? Are they sufficiently different countries that you would start again, or do you think you could accelerate what is a very long-winded process of reviewing the curriculum, and then the qualifications, the pedagogy and the accountability, by drawing on the experience of other parts of the United Kingdom?
Professor Graham Donaldson: That is an interesting question. There is an irony in the United Kingdom in that we seem more prepared to learn from countries elsewhere than we are to learn from each other. An important thing as we move forward—this committee inviting today’s session is an example of that—is that there will be more opportunity, I hope, to build on what is happening in the different jurisdictions inside the United Kingdom.
If, heaven forbid, I were Secretary of State for Education in England, a key thing that I would do is ask some very fundamental questions about the purposes of school education. It is already becoming, and will become, incredibly important as we think about the implications of artificial intelligence for the nature of what happens inside our schools. If we are not very confident about why children go to school and what the purposes of that are, we will get a very piecemeal response to a whole lot of different initiatives in relation to artificial intelligence.
If we think back to the Welsh example, having a very strong thread of understanding the purposes of school education will put Wales, I hope, in a stronger position, as we think about the implications of artificial intelligence, and relate that to those purposes rather than simply responding to the implications of the particular changes that might come from AI.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: It sounds like you would review the purposes of schooling in England and see thereafter whether there is alignment with other jurisdictions and then what you could learn. Is that the sort of sequence?
Professor Graham Donaldson: Yes. It is important that each jurisdiction owns its own purposes. It is not that you borrow purposes from elsewhere. You have to think very carefully about what you want to get from your education system and why children go to school. There are things you can learn from Scotland, Wales and Ireland about both the dos and the don’ts. Wales has learned probably more about what not to do than what to do from what happened in Scotland. Scotland kind of lost its way in relation to curriculum reform as it moved forward, as Gareth and Gordon talked about. The vital importance in secondary education of qualifications has to be thought about very carefully, because the backwash effect of qualifications on the curriculum is huge. If your qualifications are not in line with those purposes, secondary schools will respond to the qualifications and not necessarily to the purposes.
Q97 Lord Knight of Weymouth: Thank you very much. Professor Stobart, you have really good current expertise in international comparisons of how jurisdictions more widely are tackling this. Who else should we be looking at in terms of what they have been doing in curriculum review and all the consequential reforms that flow from that? I am particularly interested in the jurisdictions that are shifting the parental mindset around it all being about getting into the best universities and nothing else really matters, which causes two-thirds of young people to be left behind.
Professor Gordon Stobart: I would worry about specific cherry-picking from this system and that system. We do that a lot with the PISA results. We send coachloads of inspectors to whoever wins to find out what they did.
To pick up Graham’s point about purposes, it is no use just looking at changing the curriculum to an all-singing, all-dancing, meeting 21st-century needs curriculum if accompanying it there is no thought about how we will assess it. Many systems have done that; they come up with a new, sparkling curriculum, but the assessment system stays much the same.
Picking up the point about accountability, it seems to me very hard to move a system if you have high-stakes accountability of exam results. This is a particularly English problem. We reduced coursework, but everywhere else they are saying, “Shouldn’t we give teachers more of a role in assessment?” We cannot in England because we have removed that, largely so that our accountability measures are intact. It is a political point, I think.
Q98 Lord Knight of Weymouth: I have a final supplementary for you. Observing things internationally and across jurisdictions, how long is this process? Is it such an extended process that it is beyond one term of a Parliament and, therefore, as this committee is seeking—being on an all-party basis—we need a stronger sense of public debate and public consensus that works across party if it is to be successful? Is there any evidence on that internationally?
Professor Gordon Stobart: I make a personal point that changing to assessment systems always has to be incremental. You cannot shift things very quickly. We are very political about our assessment systems. Many countries’ assessment does not have the same political intensity, so it can become more gradual and there will be progressive changes. We have to take it step by step. It would be good to have agreed longer-term aims. We can get those, I think, with the curriculum—what we would like our students to be able to do and understand and that kind of thing. We find it a lot harder to say, “And now how do we assess it?”
Many other systems trust teachers more than our system does. Wales is trying to do that. Norway, New Zealand, Australia and Canada all trust teachers, particularly at 16, to do most of the assessment, and there are no heavy accountability pressures on them, so that frees them up to do it. There will be other worries about reliability and the like, but it is a system-wide thing. You cannot change curriculum and assessment without changing accountability.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: Does that trust help with the retention and recruitment problem of teachers?
Professor Gordon Stobart: Yes, in some countries, certainly. I think other countries have similar dilemmas to our own. It is the status that is given to the teacher. We hear a lot about Finland and the qualification system around that and that kind of thing. Social status is part of it.
Gareth Evans: Can I very quickly come in on your point on politics? In the Welsh context, we benefit very much from a stable Government who have been in power for 25 years. We are playing the long game because we can play the long game. We do not suffer the same political volatility in Wales as perhaps you do in England.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: A 25-year Labour Government would obviously be a great thing.
Baroness Garden of Frognal: It depends which party.
Q99 The Chair: We heard earlier this morning from the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, about his proposals for the MBacc. Has there been any reaction to them in Scotland and Wales?
Gareth Evans: Honestly, not that I am aware of. Given particularly that they are in an embryonic stage in England, I would not have thought that that has necessarily filtered through. I cannot speak for Qualifications Wales, our regulator, because I do not work closely enough to them. I can say that we have a Welsh baccalaureate in Wales, and there is some talk about that perhaps evolving into something a bit different and becoming the form of qualification at 16 and 18. We do not know. It is early days.
The Chair: Professor Donaldson, is there any reaction?
Professor Graham Donaldson: In both Scotland and Wales, there is a greater recognition of the importance of place and the devolution of decision-making to a more local level. The MBacc that Andy Burnham talked about would certainly fit in with that kind of notion. Scotland, of course, is a much smaller country, with a population of 5.5 million, so you would not necessarily have a GBacc or an EBacc or whatever it might be. The basic principle of trying to create more powerful decision-making more locally is certainly part of the thinking in Scotland, and it has been part of the thinking in Wales as well.
The Chair: Great, thank you very much.
Q100 Lord Baker of Dorking: It has been a fascinating discussion, because this is what the purpose of education is all about. What is so interesting is that there comes a time in education when change is in the air and you can get changes, so I am very optimistic that it will be forthcoming. It can all be done. I would say to Jim that, in a four-year term of government—I did it in the 1980s—it can be done if you know what you are doing. I was lucky that I became the Minister when there was change in the air. If you do not have that, nothing will happen. It is there at the moment.
To what extent in this change do you allow the views of children to emerge? There are certain ages at which children really cannot judge—below 11, and probably even 11 and 12. The schools I am promoting decide at 14. They make their decision themselves. We do not have the money to promote them. The schools tell them not to touch UTCs with a bargepole, and yet somehow 20,000 students themselves have decided that they do not want to go on doing what they are doing in their ordinary school with their ordinary teachers. They look at our website, they try to visit a UTC that exists, they see it and they say, “We’ll go there”, and they like it. It is not just engineering and computing; we now do medical and social care, and we do the creative arts, working with the National Theatre and with Sky producing jobs for the entertainment industry, because there are huge opportunities there.
What I am trying to say is that lots of people say children are having to make big decisions at 14 and they are not capable. All I can say is that I think they are more mature than I was at 14 for all sorts of reasons, and they are quite capable of having views as to what they want to do. How do you alert those views in Scotland and Wales? Are you trying to alert them or not? Does the professor have a view on that?
Professor Gordon Stobart: One concern in Scotland—I think Graham will back me up on this—is asking students what they want both in the curriculum and in the form of assessment. We do not often consult the students. We just tell them what will happen. I would be a strong advocate, having worked in vocational education with the NCVQ as it was then, of trying to integrate vocational and general to give a much wider range of choices for students, and looking at nations that may have done a better job of equal parity. There is never complete parity, but it is the parity of esteem in taking a vocational route rather than a general route. We are still dogged by that here in England. Whether we can move away from that is important.
Lord Baker of Dorking: We can.
Q101 Lord Lexden: Lord Baker asked about children. How have teachers and parents in particular, as well as policy experts and academia, reacted to the reform programmes in both Scotland and Wales? The reaction of parents and teachers is important.
Professor Graham Donaldson: In both countries, the initial enthusiasm for the reforms certainly among teachers but also among parents was very strong. In both cases, that grew out of a major reappraisal of the purpose of schooling that tried to engage as broad a cross-section of all the key stakeholders as possible. It is the notion of trying to create much more ownership of the nature of what is happening in reform, so that policy is not something that is done to you, but those who are involved at the sharp end feel much more directly involved in thinking through the implications of the broad direction set nationally, and are not just simply implementing something that is handed down to them from the centre.
Gareth might want to comment on this. I have been surprised, given all that has happened in the intervening time, including the pandemic, at the extent to which there remains a pretty strong determination in many teachers in Wales to make the reform work. That is a testament to the way in which the Welsh Government have tried to ensure that the process of co-construction gives much more ownership at the school level. That sense of ownership is what sustains change. If it is simply, “You have to do this because you’re being told to”, it is very hard to sustain enthusiasm for change in that context. If you own it, you are much more likely to run with it.
Gareth Evans: I echo what Graham said. The profession was very excited and enthused a decade ago, and it is as enthused and invigorated by it now. The issue is more to do with the mechanics of implementation. That is potentially what is holding us back currently. As for parents, there has been a communication strategy. Schools have been told directly—schools are best placed to talk to their parents—to start sharing the message with them. I see this, as I mentioned earlier, as being a long game. If I were to be honest, I do not think every parent in Wales is fully aware of the change that is under way, and probably will not be for some time, which is why I would challenge the notion of curriculum change and reform of this type being a four-year project. I think it is much longer than that. It could be at least a decade before we start really embedding some of these new practices.
Q102 Lord Aberdare: While we are thinking about the reactions and engagement of all the different groups—this is probably again one for Gareth—we have heard much less in this second session about the role of employers and their engagement, and how the skills agenda is linked to the education system. Would you like to say a word about how that is happening in Wales?
Gareth Evans: It is very much in lockstep with the curriculum. We are not transforming only GCSEs and potentially looking at A-levels; we are also looking at vocational qualifications. There is a review currently under way. There will be, I understand, a much wider offer at a vocational level. There are new opportunities now emerging via the regulator, who has consulted widely with both the public and the profession as to what they think is the best way forward.
Lord Aberdare, now that you have got me going on this, because of the involvement of so many different players in our system, I have a slight nervousness about the potential for groupthink. I do not think there is a lot of space for challenge. I am not sure what Graham would think of this. Because universities, inspection, government and schools are part of the same whole, I do not necessarily see the opportunity now for somebody, every so often, to quietly challenge, critique and comment on what is going on. It may be something to be mindful of if England was to step into the new way of working.
Lord Baker of Dorking: Can I make one last point, Chair? In the system, children want to know what GCSEs they have, what A-levels they have and whether they have got to university. Those are the standards as to whether you know a school is being successful. We know destination data—what happens at 18. If I may suggest, that is a very good measure of accountability. How many become apprentices? Twenty-five per cent with us. How many go to university? Fifty per cent do STEM subjects. The others get local jobs to fill the skills. That is why we are so popular. That is why we are heavily oversubscribed. We have thousands of students this year who want to do that. You have to create a system. What happens to me at 18? What am I really going to do with my life at 18? I do not think there is enough of that. Just passing exams is not just what happens at 18.
The Chair: Lord Lexden will ask the last question.
Q103 Lord Lexden: Can I bring things back to accountability, which many of you have touched on in the course of our discussion? Perhaps you could very kindly gather thoughts together and give us your conclusions on the ways in which Wales and Scotland compare with England and the benefits and drawbacks of the different approaches.
Professor Graham Donaldson: One major concern of any reform is that you have to have the accountability system and the purpose of the reform in lockstep, otherwise the accountability system will always be a drag anchor in the nature of reform. I think, as a former head of the inspectorate, that there is a risk that you will see that schools are free to take their own decisions as long as they please the inspectorate, so effectively the inspectorate becomes the decider of what is good or what is not good in what is happening inside a school. The nature of the accountability system has to relate much more obviously to what really matters in the result of schooling.
Lord Baker’s point about destinations is very important. That is a very good indicator of how successful a school system is. It is interesting that Wales is introducing sample testing along similar lines to PISA. From a governmental point of view, from the point of view of policy decisions, they will not have to wait for PISA or whatever it might be, but they will have regular sampling of performance that will allow policy to be adjusted and evaluated on a regular basis.
Picking up Gareth’s point, one way in which you can guard against groupthink—Wales is now doing this particularly well; Scotland did not do it well—is by developing a comprehensive evaluation strategy around the reform programme. Having an evaluation strategy that can give you good feedback in real time is incredibly important in reform. If you do not do that, you tend to get evaluation by who shouts loudest or evaluation by anecdote. A systematic evaluation programme running in parallel to the programme is very important.
I have one last point about accountability. One of the things that I said very clearly in Successful Futures is that, if there is any tension between assessment for learning and assessment for accountability, assessment for learning must win out every time. We cannot have an accountability system that gets in the way of the very powerful role that assessment has in helping young people to grow and learn, and assessment is a critical part of that process. We have found that some of the high-stakes accountability means that that process has been completely subverted, and in the worst circumstances you can find that young people are there to serve the school’s reputation rather than the assessment serving the needs of the young person. We have to be very clear about the relationship between assessment and accountability. If there is any tension between the two, we have to find other ways of delivering the accountability agenda and not allow it to compromise the nature of assessment in the learning process.
Professor Gordon Stobart: Could I chip in comparatively with nations that do sampling? America has a very decentralised system, with huge trust in the teachers or different formats within it. It has the NAEP, which is called the nation’s report card. It does sampling to find out what is happening at state level and more local level. New Zealand and Scotland did that for a long time. We find out what is happening about the standards nationally by sampling, not by combining exam results and the like.
Q104 Lord Knight of Weymouth: Could I follow up, Professor Donaldson? You have done your work looking at inspection in Wales. We gather that Estyn is looking at removing school grading from its framework altogether. Next week, we will talk to Amanda Spielman, the chief inspector of schools in England. What is your view on single-word judgments, grading schools, and how helpful that is for parents and for school system improvement?
Professor Graham Donaldson: Single-word judgments have the illusion of simplicity, but the huge risk is that that simplicity becomes simplistic. My view, reflecting on my time as head of the inspectorate and having had the chance to work with Estyn—Estyn is getting rid of single grades—is that, when you grade a school by trying to arrive at a single judgment on a school, the purpose of the inspection becomes totally focused on that judgment.
The power of inspection is to actually focus on how we make the school better. What needs to be done in a school in order to make it better, and how can we combine the self-evaluation of the school with the external perspective of the inspector in such a way that if you put those two things together you might arrive at something that can help to set the priorities for the school as it moves forward? Where you have single-word judgments, both inspectors and schools become totally focused on that single word. Schools, in my experience, once they hear what the judgment is, do not hear anything else, and inspectors spend huge amounts of time arguing about angels on the head of a pin and on which side of a line a school is actually falling.
I have much more respect for parents’ ability to read a bit of prose that tries to capture the nuances of a school, which tries to say that, like every school, it has strengths and it has areas that it needs to improve. It is a much more subtle process than one that can be reduced to a single best buy-type judgment. As a reformed inspector, I would say that I now regret the fact that we used those judgments. It was never a single judgment about a school as a whole, but there were judgments about aspects of how the school worked. I certainly recommended to Estyn that it should drop that. My view, as somebody who spent a long career in inspection, is that inspection is far too important to be reduced simply to telling a school which side of a line it falls on.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: The wisdom of a recovering inspector.
Gareth Evans: Can I quickly dive in to correct the record on that? Estyn has now dropped summative grades, as of last year. There has not been a huge outcry and clamour from parents for summative grades, as far as I am aware. Teachers very much welcome the narrative approach. There is more dialogue between inspector and teacher. It seems to be going very well.
More generally, I know we have all laboured the point, but we have to understand and realise what assessment is for. What are we using it for? Are we using it for the purposes of accountability to demonstrate to Estyn that we are doing things in the right way and that we are getting so many learners through Progress 8 or Capped 9, or are we assessing to support individual learners to make progress? That is really what it boils down to, and that is what we are doing differently in Wales.
The Chair: Great. Thank you very much. Thank you all for your evidence and for your time today. We are very grateful.
