Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's meeting of the Children, Young People and Education Committee. We've received no apologies for absence. Can I ask Members whether there are any declarations of interest, please?
Yes, I have a declaration of interest, Chair. I understand that my daughter features in one of the videos that is going to be used to contribute evidence to this inquiry. And, in addition, I'm a governor of one of the schools that features in the video.
Thank you, Darren. So, item 2, then, today is our first session on the provision of textbooks and learning resources for pupils, which is a video of interviews with young people and teachers. The committee team has been out to take video evidence around Wales, and we're now going to watch the results of that on the screen. Okay. Well, I'm sure that the committee would want me to place on record our thanks to the young people and the teachers who took part in that very helpful and informative video. We'll move on now then to our evidence session, and I'm very pleased to welcome Gareth Pierce, chief executive of the WJEC, Mike Ebbsworth, assistant director educational support, WJEC, Philip Blaker, chief executive of Qualifications Wales, and Emyr George, associate director general qualifications at Qualifications Wales. So, thank you all of you for attending and thank you for the papers that you provided in advance as well. If you're happy, we'll go straight into questions now, and if I can just start by asking you to outline what you see as your role in ensuring that students and teachers in Wales have the resources that they need to pass general qualifications and what you think the role of commercial publishers and Welsh Government is.
Shall I start? So, Qualifications Wales is the regulator of the awarding bodies, so we regulate awarding bodies. Our powers are structured around the regulating of awarding bodies. We don't regulate commercial publishers nor the provision of textbooks within that. In regulating the awarding body, our primary focus is also on the design of the qualifications and then the delivery of the assessment. So, it's much more around the assessment side than teaching resources. That said, when we are going through the design of the qualifications, we go through an approval process, so we develop approval criteria and we ask WJEC to submit their specifications against those approval criteria and sample assessment materials as well. So, our focus is very much on making sure that teachers are able, through the sample assessment materials and the specifications, to have a good understanding of what is going to be expected of them in the examinations and of their pupils in the examinations. So, that's setting out the knowledge, skills and understandings that will be assessed by WJEC when those exams are sat. We have in the past pulled together groups of people to look at issues like resources. So, during the last round of approvals, we pulled together interested parties in Welsh Government, regional consortia and WJEC to look at resources that would be available with a view to facilitating the discussion about who would be best placed to fill the gaps where there may be perceived to be gaps in resources. Our other primary role is in maintaining standards. So, as the regulator of qualifications, what we want to do is we want to make that the awards of qualifications—so, the grades that people get—are fair. One of the things we do is set out the way in which the awarding bodies will set grades—so, the awarding process, the methods that will be used—and then we monitor WJEC's award of grades against those processes. During a period of change, we prescribe the use of comparable outcomes as the primary approach, largely because comparable outcomes are designed for circumstances like this, where there's a change in a specification particularly, because there are any number of reasons, including resources, why performance may be different from one year to the next, but comparable outcomes is there to ensure that, all things being equal, if the cohorts have the same ability, the same grade should be awarded from one year to the next. We do recognise that there have been delays in textbooks. Much of that has been related to the timelines that we've all had to deliver new specifications against, which have been far from ideal for everybody involved. We think that particularly our role moving forward will be looking at the timelines for reforms that will be necessary for the new curriculum to make sure that this situation isn't repeated and that there is sufficient time in future reforms to allow for greater system readiness. In terms of the roles of others, Welsh Government have a role at the moment in terms of grant funding of translation of materials into Welsh medium. And there is, through the common model at the moment—and this is a model that is common between England and Wales—a reliance on commercial publishers to provide textbooks. Now, that's something that probably needs to be looked at in the future in terms of potential different models for how that might be achieved and also, potentially, around a paradigm shift in what's expected of those materials. So, I think that sets out Qualification Wales's position in particular.