Cabinet Secretary opens up to Committee

Kirsty Williams AM, Cabinet Secretary for Education, appeared before the Senedd Children Young People and Education Committee (Senedd CYPE) in a scrutiny session for over an hour on Wednesday 14 June. See it here.

A number of things were revealed or confirmed:

• Qualified for Life 2.0 will not be published before Autumn 2017. A refresh of the existing Qualified for Life (QfL) was promised back in November 2016. This is Welsh Government’s key strategic document for the entire education reform programme.
• Officially, the delay is due to a desire to reference recent OECD recommendations. The main difference between QfL 1 and 2.0 will be a new overarching priority focus added to the existing ones – Wellbeing. Unofficially, it is likely that there has been a protracted internal debate about turning a desire to promote Wellbeing into a clear and well-defined strategic goal and then identifying a menu of actions geared to achieving it. Pesky elections will have affected the progress of the document too.
• PISA – the Cabinet Secretary is not targeting a Top 20 position nor entry into the ‘500 club’. Rather, she wants to see Wales making progress. The next PISA tests are sat in 2018 with outcomes published in 2019.
• Progress on developing the new curriculum, Successful Futures, is back on track. High-level curriculum frameworks for the Areas of Learning and Experience (AoLEs) have been delivered; they are now being considered by Curriculum and Assessment and other cross-cutting or overarching teams. Despite this, the Cabinet Secretary said clearly that she is after ‘getting it right’ rather than sticking to a set timeline. No date was given for publishing an updated set of new curriculum documents.
• Consortia have been tasked with ensuring more and better dialogue between Pioneer and non-Pioneer schools.
• Although the new Leadership Academy will not be officially established until Spring 2018, the Cabinet Secretary expects the existing Shadow Board will ensure a consistent offer on leadership development by all consortia and throughout Wales from September 2017.
• Together with the Minister for Health, the Cabinet Secretary is looking at a programme to build learner resilience in Years 7, 8 and 9. More detail to come.
• Guidance on what might be a reasonable marking workload for teachers is being developed, led by one consortia.
• A pilot initiative involving Local Authorities will look at how high-calibre School Business Managers might work across several schools and relieve some burden from headteachers.
• Cabinet Secretary reminded Committee that many of this year’s GCSEs are new and reflect a concern to introduce more rigour – this may have an impact on results, and this year’s results will not be directly comparable to previous years.
• A dashboard approach to accountability is under active consideration. No indication was given of when a set of new accountability measures might emerge.
• A detailed departmental budget breakdown will be sent to the Committee by letter in due course.

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From compliance to conviction

Education Secretary Kirsty Williams AM will make a statement in the Senedd on the latest OECD report on Wales next Tuesday, 28 February.

Back in October 2016, the Secretary commissioned the OECD to look at the strategies Welsh Government has adopted for reforming education – strategies that are, in part, a response to a 2014 OECD report.

Insiders have been briefing already that this latest OECD report will be favourable.

That shouldn’t be a surprise.

No surprise that the spin is suggesting that the OECD are backing current Welsh Government reforms.

But also, no surprise that this OECD report should be favourable – the 2014 OECD report made recommendations and Welsh Government has stated that it has been pursuing these recommendations; it would be politically explosive if OECD were to report that this isn’t true.

Tuesday is also the first day of a rather hastily arranged two day event where the Secretary has invited every secondary headteacher from across Wales to Cardiff.

Every headteacher has been offered an overnight stay.  Headteachers who weren’t prompt in confirming their attendance have been chased down.

This is an unusual event.

It isn’t difficult to get access to all headteachers as they frequently attend other meetings at a local, regional and national basis.

It isn’t difficult to get messages to headteachers; one person in a single morning could lick all the stamps you’d need to send a letter to each of our 214 secondary headteachers.

This meeting is clearly intended to secure the engagement of our headteachers with Welsh Government’s programme.  They will be encouraged to ‘get with the programme’ and ‘get on message’.

Citing OECD as a supporter of the reforms is meant to encourage stakeholders to accept the message.

This might not work with all headteachers.  OECD’s PISA tests have made many both wary and weary of the gurus from Paris.

Andy Buck’s excellent ‘Leadership Matters’ has a chapter called Building Trust.

He says that educationalists often talk about partnership and collaboration.  He could have added co-construction, and that all these are claimed to be characteristic of a ‘self-improving system’ (an idea also often heard).

However, he says, it is not often that people reflect on the conditions that allow partnership and collaboration to flourish and be successful.  A key condition is trust.

Getting people to trust in you as a leader might involve three elements: they need to know you have faith in them and care about their success as individuals; they will need to believe in your integrity; your judgement and competency are persuasive (or at least you are persuasively working on getting both right).

These are tough tests if applied to Welsh Government’s relationship with headteachers.

By offering stakeholders an opportunity to shape the message, Welsh Government is taking a big step towards getting the message right and getting it adopted.

Adoption is a much stronger association than mere acceptance.  It is the difference between pursuing a policy with purpose and seeking nothing more than compliance.

This adoption can only happen if the offer of contributing to shaping the message is genuine, evident and made real.

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