 Rwyf yn ffawr o dda'r ffobl yma wedi'i'n mwyaf o'r oedd ddim yn dechrau... ...yna y fawr o'r dywan o'r rai gael am y Cymryd, teithio yn oed amgoedd yn yllankwyr o Estyn, mwyaf o'r Repwysigh. Felly mae'r oed o ddim yn fawr o'r proses yw'r dweud yng nghymoedd â'r gastlion gyd pechwyn mewn ddim yn ddenchangol gyrraedd a'r gwasanaeth a'r ddwynghwn. Rwy'n gwybod, wrth gyd, y dychysigiaeth o'r comments y gallwch ddod. Rwy'n gwybod yn wedi'i gweithio cerdd Hitblych ar gael. Rwy'n gwneud i hyn o'r ddangosol ymyl tua i gyhoeddwch. O weithio gwneud i ddim yn dwyledd. Mae'r diolch yn fawr, eto stef, o'r cymryd rwy'n gwisio. Ac mae hyn yn i'n meddwl drwy, rydyn ni'n ymhwylliant yma, ond rydych chi'n ddim yn bod gyfyrdd cyfr infinite. Dwi'n deithas Llywodraeth a Gwyllgorraeth yn rhaid i ddweud susod fel ddigon a'r archifion bryd yma. Dwi ddweud i'r gwaith bod gynnwys gyda'r awrthio'r trof, y dyfodol yn ddigon i'r gwleidio'n amser i'r gwyntafol hwnne啊, mae'r amser gofiad yn y maen nhar刻nodd, ac mae'n cymryd yn y maen nhar. Ychydig y ddan nhw'n cyrraeth ar y ddweud a'r gweithio'r trof yn ddweud, drwy gael yn adnodol. 9, and this audience in particular, I'm acutely aware, has a particularly difficult task in looking at the aspirations which are embedded in the curriculum for Wales and the purposes that we're trying to pursue for our young people, but you have very particular pressures on you, not least in terms of the examination qualification system and that's not simply because mae'r ffordd o'r maesialau o'r gyflwydoedd gyda'r ysgol yng Nghymru, ond mae'r ffordd o'r gwybr iawn iawn i ymgyrch, a mae'n ddigonol i'r gwaith yn y cyfleoedd. Wrth gilydd, mae'r peth yn y gyfnod o'r rhaid yn cael ei gwybod bod y rhagleniadau ar yr awrgog, y rhagleniadau i'r cyfleoedd, ac y rhagleniadau i'r rhagleniadau i'r rhagleniadau o'r cwrs ymlaen o'r cyffredin pledge ond enw ynddi dda, i ddweud feeseth yw'n gweithio'n ddefnyddio'r gwaith dim. Restrwyth amdano, sy'n cael y gwbl gwahag i gwneud hynny, yn y gallu'r hoffi amser o'ch lesodau, ond ni'n colliad o'r cyffredin yn ymddi sy'n hoffi amdano sy'n hoffi amdano, ond feddw i'r hoffi ar y cyffredin neu'r hoffi ar yr adegwyd debyg o'u ffordd. ydych am gallu wrth osum hwn? A i gael i eisteddam wedi chi gael unrhyw i資odiannau gwaent y cy knightswyr oedd ei cyn arch syniad h 축 i'r gallu holl gwa coefficient i nesaf cyf���w. Efallяж iddi gael hefyd o'r proses bach rydyn ni'n wneud felly every thing you wouldn't need to talk about is about a view of accountability that dates back to the mid 1970s, a point at which politicians in the UK lost faith in the teaching profession. The famous Jim Callaghan made a speech at Ruskind College in 1976, inniadwll yn ymgyrchol yn 1976, ond, byddai'n meddwl yng Nghymru, a'r cyd-dweithio'n fwyaf ychydig yn ymgyrchol, yn ymgyrchol, byddai'n meddwl y gallwn y ddiw cyrchol a'r cyrchol yma, ac rwy'n teimlo'n digwydd eu bod yn ei fywg o'i ddweud yn ymgyrchol, oedd yn ei ddweud yr ysgol iawn, ac mae'n ymdweud o'i ddweud o'r cyd-dweud ar gyfer y rhan o'i ddweud yn y lleol yw'r cyd-dweud. ac mae'r ysgolwyddiad i'r Prif Weinidder yn 1976, ddwy'r dal i'r Argynchyniddor yw'r ysgolwyddiad i'r Argynchyniddor yw'r Ysgolwyddiad i'r Ysgolwyddiad i'r Ysgolwyddiad i'r Ysgolwyddiad i'r Ysgolwyddiad i'r Ysgolwyddiad i'r Ysgolwyddiad, oedd yma'r rhagor i'r gweithio ac yn cyfwyrdwyr arwad o'r cyfnoddau yw'r cyfnoddau'r newid yn gyfosibol i'r peidiadau, y gallu cyfnoddau mor cyfnoddau o'r unig, byddai'r oeddechrau yn gweithio lleol ar y cwrdd. That's why we are where we are today, because it traces back to that point. The first inspection reports were published in 1983. Prior to 1983 inspection was largely about policy and advice. It wasn't about individual school accountability, it was largely a process that was designed to inform the political and policy debate and to provide advice to schools of a more general nature, Ond o'r newydd y nifer 1983, ac yn 1992, o'r creu ystod o'r OSTED, y cyfnodau cyfnodd, am y gallur y cyfnodd cyfnodd yn ymddi gymrydol yn y ffordd. Ond ydych chi'n ymchwil yw'r cyfnodd yw ymgyrch yn ymgyrch. we have to recognise that simply saying that there was a golden age back prior to the 1970s, which we just need to return to, is not an option. The danger is that that recreates the kind of confidence issues which were around then. What we need to do as a profession is to convince politicians and the public more generally that we will shape an accountability system, which can give them confidence that the young people of Wales are being well served and the young people of Wales are going to achieve in relation to the four-purpose of the national curriculum, as well as we collectively can possibly help them to do so. The problem is, for all of us, is that we are in a situation where the challenge-facing education, if you look across the world, this is the case, the challenge-facing education has never been more difficult. Knowing what the right thing to do, the right thing to do for our children, it's never been more difficult. What I talked about in terms of the growth of accountability mechanisms took place in the context of an increasing acceptance, particularly from 1988, onwards with the creation of a national curriculum, that we know what the curriculum should look like. We know what schools are for. Schools are for delivering the curriculum that was created in 1988, and there's one in the accountability system that makes sure that that is what is actually happening in our schools, and you create structures around about that that try to make sure that's going to happen. The problem now is that the nature of the world that our young people, we are all living in, and our young people who live their lives in, as they move into adulthood and right throughout the entire of the century and beyond, we can't even begin to anticipate the nature of that world. Therefore, what we need to do during the short time we have them, that will help equip them, not just to cope but to thrive in that world that they are going to be living their entire life in. Across the world, there's an increasing debate about the nature of the curriculum. Universities gave up curriculum studies for about 15 years. It's quite hard to find anyone inside a university who actually specialises in the curriculum, because from 1988 onwards that wasn't an issue. But it is now. It really is now. What is it that we can best do in order to ensure that our young people are getting the kind of experience during their time at school which is going to help them to thrive as they move forward throughout their lives? It's interesting that the nature of the way in which that worldwide debate is going, there are patterns emerging which suggests that the kind of things that we're doing here in Wales puts Wales right in the vanguard of current thinking about the best way in which we can serve our young people in the future. If you look at some of the work that OECD has been doing recently on the 2030 project and some of the contributions that Andrea Slike was making, including what Andrea has said to us, the thrust of what's being said is very much along the lines of the kind of things that are happening here in Wales at the moment. That's about these four purposes. I'm not going to go into the four purposes that are there, but it's about saying that we should think about the curriculum as not just about coverage of content or skills, but how all of that comes together to help to shape young people so that they can move forward in their lives in relation to the kind of way in which we've helped them to be ready to engage with that future. The way in which we go about that first of all means that we need to be very clear what we're talking about and that's all young people in relation to those purposes. It's breaking the link between identity and destiny. It's breaking the link between where you come from, the terms where you're going to end up. That's a critical part of our mission as educators. It's about raising standards, but it's about defining standards in a way that is not simply a narrow definition of what standards are. It means that the young people are getting the best learning possible and that they themselves are developing in relation to that learning. Their own learning is developing to the highest standard that they can arise. We need a debate about standards so that standards don't become reductionist and therefore drive behaviours, which are also reductionist. We need to get that progressive line of sight so the relatively short time that we have young people in school looking from when they enter at 3, 4 or 5, whenever they come into the broad education system to the point at which they leave. We've got a clear line of sight in terms of progression in terms of their learning in relation to those four purposes. We need to ensure that young people, that their experience of school gives them an intrinsic satisfaction in learning. An intrinsic satisfaction in learning. Learning gives you a buzz. Learning is worthwhile. Learning is something that you can enjoy. Learning is not simply something that you do in order to pass a test or pass an exam. That's a critical part of what we need to do. If young people are going to be successful lifelong learners, then they have got to get that intrinsic satisfaction, that belief in learning and satisfaction from engaging in learning, not simply as a means to an end in terms of a particular test. As one of the questions earlier was there, we've got to be very clear about well-being. That young people will learn well and they will thrive throughout their lives if we engage with that whole notion of their well-being while they're at school and helping to equip them to understand how they can look after themselves in terms of their own well-being as they move forward into the next stages in their life. To do that, there's a whole variety of things that we need to do. Steve's point about an ecosystem is absolutely at the heart of what Wales is engaged in at the moment. It's not just simply picking a bit of reform and saying, we'll do that and the rest will have to just fit in. It's genuinely looking at the whole nature of the education system as an ecosystem with all the parts interacting. You change one bit and it affects something else. You've got to be able to think about that. So we've got to focus on what matters. We've got to reconcile and this is something that's come through. We've got to recognise what matters, what works and what's possible. If there's one justification for co-construction, that's it, because you're in the best position to reconcile what matters, what works and what's possible. It's not simply a matter of what's possible. We've got to be very clear about our ambition, about what matters. We've got to draw on experience from elsewhere in terms of what... Actually, I'm not a lot keen in the phrase what works. It's what might work. There isn't any absolute thing. You can just lift from somewhere else and that'll work. It's a process of learning about how things have been addressed and the way in which they can help us to understand how we can best engage with young people. That whole notion of enthusiastic engagement, the word capacity has been used a lot on the coast this morning. It is absolutely critical, the confidence and capacity of those who are engaging with their young people using evidence in ways that support and challenge our assumptions, cosy assumptions. Actually, partly that's what happened back in the 1970s when politicians lost faith in us, because they thought we all shared... There was a kind of professional conspiracy. They didn't even use the phrase professional conspiracy that was designed to keep the public out. They talked about the secret garden, the secret garden of the curriculum, something which is all about professionals everybody else keep out. It was an education minister back in the 1960s, whose name I think was Tom Lonson, who proudly said... He was from Yorkshire, so forgive the North Country attempt at an accent. Minister knows not about curriculum. Proudly said that. Minister knows not about curriculum, not my job. That's your job. That's a professional's job. Then they began to say, well actually, this is not enough. We're all engaged in thinking about the nature of the curriculum. So what does that mean in terms of assessment, accountability and inspection? What does it mean in terms of what we should look for in terms of the kind of approach to this area, which is going to work with all that we're trying to do, not work against, not sit in judgment on, but actually help us as part of the process of doing the kind of things that we believe are the right things to do. The first one is we've got to get an approach whereby the information we get from accountability, the evidence that we're getting from that, is timely. It's not telling us what was the case. It's giving us information that allows us, helps us to engage with looking forward into the future. So there's something about accountability systems that are often backward looking. They tell you what was the case in the past and, therefore, you've got a leap of faith that because it was like that, it's like that now and, therefore, it's going to be like that in the future. So there's an issue about the timeliness, the immediacy of the evidence we get from accountability. I think we need to reframe the debate. We need to reframe the language that we use around accountability. I prefer us to use the language of learning rather than the language of judgment. So what the accountability system is about is helping us all to learn better how to improve, enhance the learning of our young people. So the accountability system is about learning. It's not simply about judging or putting a label on whatever it is that's happening. It's got to focus on what really matters. And in our context, that's about the whole, the four curriculum purposes and the way in which that's actually taking shape and being given life in our schools. The accountability system has got to not be something that is alien, not a done-to process, but a done-with process, one that genuinely empowers the young people themselves, but also those that the teachers' schools and the system were generally to pursue the best routes towards those curriculum purposes. It's somebody on the outside doesn't have the right answer, which you've just got to try and arrive at somehow or other in order to satisfy that accountability mechanism. The right answer is the answer that we collectively arrived at. I think that was a theme that Steve Mumby was talking about. We've got to get the consistency right so that the alignment between all the various external pressure there are on a school, where that comes from consortia, where that comes from Welsh Government, where that comes from Estyn, that there's a consistency and alignment across all of those. So schools are not trying to work out at any particular point in time which master they're trying to say of who they're trying to please in order to satisfy accountability. But of course, of course, accountability has also got to give assurance. It's got to give assurance. The whole question of public confidence. The public has to have confidence that they can safely leave their children in our charge and left in our charge, their children will do well, be well looked after, will be conscious of their well being but will also build them in relation to the kind of purposes that we're talking about. So they need assurance that that's actually happening at the individual level, at the school level, at the authority and consortium level and also at the level of the system as a whole. And there are a number of issues which I just want to pick out, which I think, and I'm thinking about these in the context of the work I'm doing now around Estyn, is a number of things that we've got to think about in terms of how do we avoid some of the perverse effects that have been around in the past, not necessarily particularly in Wales but are generally a function of the high stakes accountability system. And the first one is something which relates back to work that was done back in the 1970s by Donald Campbell. And essentially what that says is that if I simplify it, that if you have a single, if you reduce accountability to a number, if you recruit it to one judgment, then the consequences of that are that A, people will try to arrive at that number or judgment or label and sometimes that means they'll do things that you don't want them to do. Also, the tendency is for the measure itself to become inflated. People find ways of making it look better than it actually is. So it's not helping learning, it's actually doing the reverse because it's masking the kind of things that really need to happen to make things better in order to look better, not to be better. That can be one of the consequences if you have an oversimplistic reduction of the process. All of that means that the scores, whatever they are at the end of the day, lose their value. So you may be able to produce spreadsheets till the cows come home, but actually they're all based on data which is corrupted from the start and therefore it looks as if things are happening, but actually you're getting the worst of all possible worlds. The corrupted data, the data is not helping learning inside the school nor is it giving an accurate picture of what's happening more generally inside the system as a whole and the whole education process becomes distorted. If we try to reduce the complexity of what you are all engaged in to something which lends itself to a very simple overarching judgment where that being a league table or anything else, then the likelihood is that we're going to get those consequences and the likelihood is that you drive the kind of culture in the system where children serve the schools rather than the schools serving the children. So that's where you get the business of gaming, that's where you get focus on the marginal youngsters in order that they move up and down and ignore the ones that you don't think you can make enough progress on to look good. All of that happens so you end up the system where children serve the schools rather than schools serving the children. Another thing that we need to address in terms of the accountability structure in which was one of the messages very much in successful futures was about the nature of assessment. I'm not going to go through all of that, but essentially the message I think that Steve Davis gave in his opening remarks that we must be very clear that if there's attention between assessment helping children's learning and assessment being used for accountability, then helping children's learning wins every time. And if there is a consequence, if the distorting effect of it being used for accountability inhibits the extent in which it's going to improve children's learning, then we have to find different ways of getting the accountability evidence that we need and not focus, not allow children's learning to become distorted. We have to be careful that assessment isn't used in order to serve conflicting purposes, that I've just been talking about. Make sure assessment doesn't rely simply on that which you can measure as a sole indicator. The things that are most easily measured become the things that matter most. That's true in terms of children's learning because a lot of what children learn is actually very hard to assess. It's extremely difficult to assess so that we've got to recognise that and we've got to do justice to that complexity in terms of the assessment processes we have, not say because it's so difficult we'll just use this because that's what we've got. We've got to be really invest and when we talk about capacity building one of the most important areas for capacity building is in the profession's capacity to assess the things that matter and not the things that you gravitate towards in terms of what you can do in order to arrive at what appears to be an assessment at the end of the day. A third thing that we've got to be careful about is what I have described as the improvement trap. Ironically, I worry about the word improvement because what you often get is that the nature of all the pressures that surround a school or an education system often drives us into a kind of vortex where what we end up with is improvement which is in relation to a metrics driven reductionist view of what education is for and all of those pressures are on all of us and they do drive you in that direction. They do push you into that vortex where what matters disappears into the vortex because of those external pressures and we know the kind of things that will are liable to make things better. We know that if you invest in teacher capacity we know that if you get better evidence about what works in the nature of the surround to good learning and teaching we know that if you invest in leadership we know if we encourage greater collaboration all of that will help but if we're not clear about what it's for in the first place what we end up with is better metrics driven reductionist curriculum that all we do is get better and better at doing things that are less and less relevant so that the whole system of accountability and inspection has got to be very clear that what we are engaging with doesn't drive us into that improvement trap. We were satisfied with improvement but improvement is not necessarily the things that matter most. Further, well in terms of avoiding the improvement trap got to reflect the changes and the purposes, maintain the focus of those purposes of the driver of learning and teaching, be clear about what matters and of course professional learning and leadership at the heart of that and interestingly the Swedish at the finish education minister last year said some very important things I think which broadly reflects the kind of things that I've been saying about but perhaps the most important one is the phrase teachers are the change makers teachers are the change makers at the nature of what actually happens at the end of the day it's a no brainer isn't it you know it's it's heads it's actually your ability to to influence what children learn at the end of the day and the quality of learning is all about the teachers you've got that's that's at the end of the day where the who you make the biggest difference so investing in teachers are but recognising that we are working in a context where the nature of what it is that how we define good learning and teaching and how we define the purpose of learning is not the same as it was in the past it's that itself is changing and we must not be afraid to engage of that so the kind of of of understandable refrain you sometimes hear from teachers and from head teachers oh for goodness sake can't they just stop this change for us just leave us alone and let us just do what we do and we'll we can do that well that's very understandable but it's not good enough because the context that we operate within means that you the profession has got to take control much greater control of making sure that we're doing the right things not just being left to do the things that we've done better and better we've got to be careful about what I'm calling simplistic simplicity and that's about overemphasising reliability because one of the ways in which you arrive at highly reliable accountability mechanisms is to reduce what you look at to something that's easily measurable so you just reduce it all and you get something which is nice and simple but actually end today as being simplistic doesn't do justice to the bread the curriculum purposes so we need to create a narrative that goes beyond numbers it doesn't data matters but data matters as part of helping us to arrive at a view data is part of an evidence base it isn't the evidence base and we need to place greater value on judgment at the end of the day not simply on the numbers the numbers don't give you the answers the numbers give you the questions most of the time in terms of of how we're actually performing and I think we've got to be awfully careful that we don't patronize the profession but particularly patronize parents because you know again our refrain that comes through is oh this is all very well all this stuff's all very well but at the end of the day parents will never understand it all therefore we just got to give them something nice and simple so we got to in inspection terms you got to tell them a school is excellent or a school is in special measure that's all they need to know or a school is red or a school is green that's all they need to know actually I think that profoundly patronizing of parents I think we need to get better at understanding how we communicate with all of those who have an interest in education in ways that do justice to complexity and we don't end up patronizing those for whom it matters really matters at the end of the day and then there's this there's this legacy lag that I talked about earlier so we need something that's as close to real time as possible which which recognises that things actually may be changing and get better so that the evaluation that you've got it doesn't relate to something that was true or may have been true but isn't necessarily true at the moment therefore we need an accountability system that helps us to look forward that is proactive and it's an engine a driver of making things better than a way of helping us to reflect on something to spare about where we were and part of that and this is the last of them is about the whole business of a system which not just Wales I mean this is generally to do with high stakes accountability where compliance becomes the norm we're trying to work out what it is that's expected of you and then just trying to do your best to satisfy whatever it is that comes on the outside so so we take agency we take the capacity to to actually do the sort of things that are going to make the biggest difference out of the system and we and we simply end up asking headteachers or rewarding headteachers for being most compliant so the headteachers do very well or can be the most compliant headteachers inside the system under the current the current arrangements so we need a bit more humility in the accountability system we need to understand that actually there are no simple answers and nobody has the answer in that sense so we need that evidence the aids learning but within that we need some humility in the system that recognises the complexity of the job that you're doing on a daily basis without at the same time just saying anything anything goes but the more you take ownership of quality the more immediate will be the improvement the more immediate will be the things that actually get better at the end of the day the less ownership you have the more it's going to the lag effect is going to be there overall and then I think in this afternoon's discussion of itself evaluation seems to me to be incredibly important I was very much involved in Scotland's development of self evaluation back in the in the 1990s where Scotland produced a set of indicators called how good is our school translated into Lord knows how many languages I wish I'd had some kind of copyright rights on that because I'd be a very rich man if I did and it crops up in all sorts of places across the world how good is our school you'll find it in all sorts of places across the world and it's a good it's a good set of quality indicators that embed our understanding at that time about the sort of things that were important in terms of of high quality learning but the problem with self evaluation is that it could become an end in itself if self evaluation is about proving that you're doing something rather than learning what you need to do then it simply becomes a process that we engage in which is part of this process of looking good rather than being good so when we're thinking about self evaluation the context of the schools are learning organization or the learning consortium or the learning education system we've got to be very clear that self evaluation doesn't end up as something which is about proving how good we are rather than helping us to learn how to get better and that that's that's deeply cultural in terms of of what that actually means at the end of the day so what does all that add up to underlying messages the assessment accountability and improvement framework has got to be true to the purposes of the curriculum got to be true to what it is that we're setting out to do in the first what we believe matters at the end of the day it has to enhance the quality for all young people and when we talk about standards we must be sure those standards don't become reduced to the measurable that the standards reflect what matters so we're talking about standards but we need to engage in a standard agenda but it makes it clear what it is that we're talking about in terms of the breadth of experience that young people get when we talk about closing the gap and we tend to talk about closing the attainment gap the experiential gap is at least as big as the attainment gap so what's in those four purposes many young people will get some of that because of the background they have many young people will you know be at the starting gate in relation to those purposes and taken forward because of the way in which their their family background helps them to do so the schools are for many young people though the only place where that experiential gap will be bridged the only place where we'll be able to take young people forward whose circumstances, whose identity is actually going to shape their future so that whole business about standards is critical we must be careful that an accountability system doesn't disempower accountability system that it is a done with you feel part of it you own it you see the point of it sometimes it may come up with uncomfortable conclusions but nonetheless it's it's uncomfortable conclusions that you recognise that if they are uncomfortable they probably should be uncomfortable because because you have engaged in the process by which we arrive at that we need an assessment process to use the kind of of shorthand that enables doesn't label and that's that's assessment for learning but of course what we need is accountability for learning accountability that enables doesn't just simply label we need to value qualitative judgments we need to value the professional judgment of teachers so it's not simply those things that come out of the measurable process that actually are the things that that should be given greatest weight that the qualitative judgment the nature of the way in which teachers are evaluating and engaging and assessing young people's learning we need to place greater value by professionals and also of the learning and we need to have that pervading the entire educational and wider political community this whole process when we're thinking about accountability has got to be something which is not only owned by the profession but is actually owned by the the broader community in Wales and particularly the political community in Wales go back to that business of public confidence if coming out of this process there's a belief that this is all all we have done is take you know a bit like Jenga you know we've pulled things out of the thing and then the whole the whole lot falls down all we're doing is taking things out and then we'll then we'll have no confidence that actually what we're doing what we need to do what you need to do what the profession needs to do is to persuade the politicians persuade the community more generally that the kind of accountability we're talking about will actually lead to better learning for the young people it will give them the kind of information they need the right information but about better learning for young people and all of that means it's uncomfortable it's uncomfortable because we need to be willing to examine established beliefs and habits one of the things that's been said to me many times over the course of the curriculum review is that we have a teaching profession that has been conditioned to comply and deliver and part of the challenge the leadership challenge in Wales just now and that's both for leaders themselves in terms of their own beliefs and habits but also for how they communicate that to their staff that those beliefs and habits which are about compliance and delivery we've got to challenge those beliefs and give people the confidence and the capacity to engage with the kind of agenda we're talking about that's particularly difficult in secondary schools and I know that but that's not a reason for not doing it thank you very much