Okay. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Children, Young People and Education Committee. We've received apologies for absence from Janet Finch-Saunders, and also from Dawn Bowden, and I'd like to welcome Huw Irranca-Davies, who is substituting for Dawn Bowden. Can I ask Members if there are any declarations of interest, please? No. Okay. We'll move on, then, to our evidence session for our inquiry on school improvement and raising standards. I'd like to welcome Kirsty Williams AM, Minister for Education, and Steve Davies, director of education. Thank you both for attending and for your detailed paper in advance of the meeting. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so we'll go straight into questions, if that's okay. If I can just start by asking you: to what extent is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development still involved in the Welsh Government's school improvement journey?
First of all, can I thank the committee for their invitation this morning, and their interest in this particular area? As you will be aware, on coming into office, the director and I agreed to ask the OECD to do a rapid review of the state of Welsh education at the beginning of this Assembly term. They did that, and the feedback from that work informed the publication and content of the national mission. I was very clear in the national mission that I would invite the OECD back to review our progress against that mission, and that has happened in the tail end of last year, and the OECD will publish their latest report on Welsh education next month now, in March. So, the expectation is that the report will be published on 23 March, and my intention is to make a statement to the Chamber on 24 March. The nature of that review is part of our ongoing development of self-evaluation. So, we talk a lot about self-evaluation in the school system. Actually, the continuing relationship with OECD is about self-evaluation of the entirety of the system and Welsh Government. We don't want to accept our own orthodoxy and just be in a bubble where we are constantly listening to ourselves and those people who might want to agree with us or tell us what we want to hear. So, the OECD is our best attempt of having some external verification of where we are. That's a risk for Ministers and for Government, because we want them to give an honest evaluation of where we are, but that's a really important tool for me, to ensure that we're constantly testing ourselves. The nature of that review is that the OECD were able to talk to whoever they felt it was important to talk to, so that included practitioners on the ground, elements of the middle tier, as well as Welsh Government. And I know, Chair—I hope you'll be pleased to hear this—that the reports of this committee have formed parts of their review, looking at how the Senedd itself has contributed to and has held the Government to account. So, as I said, we expect our report to be published towards the end of March.
Okay, thank you, Minister. Can I ask about the powers under the School Standards and Organisation (Wales) Act 2013, to ask you to tell us about the use of those powers either by Welsh Government or by local authorities, and how effective you feel that legislation has been?
Okay. Well, as you'll be aware, local authorities have quite extensive powers of intervention in schools if they feel that is necessary. If I'm honest, I think there's a mixed picture, with some local authorities using those powers not on a regular basis, but obviously demonstrating a willingness to use those powers. There are other local authorities who don't seem to have used them. Since that legislation came into being, there have been a number of reasons, because of course a local authority has to give a reason for using those powers of intervention. They usually focus on standards, but sometimes they focus on a breakdown in governance arrangements, perhaps, or a failure or a breakdown in financial management. So, sometimes the budgetary issues trigger an intervention power. And the types of interventions that have been used have included, in some cases, appointing additional governors to governing bodies, or suspending a school's delegated budget so the local authority takes on, then, financial control of that particular school, or sometimes applying to the Welsh Government to entirely replace a governing body and establish an intervention board. So, if I can give you an example of where that's been used and has been successful, in Flintshire. They applied to Welsh Government for two interim executive boards, in Sir Richard Gwyn Catholic High School and in Ysgol Trefonnen. They applied to us. Those governing bodies were dissolved. The IEBs were put in place and both of those schools, which had been in special measures, moved quite rapidly, actually, out of special measures. Perhaps the most recent example of this is one that the Chair will know very well in her own constituency of Torfaen, in Cwmbran High School, where Torfaen has intervened in that case. The Welsh Government has not used those powers to date. My expectation always is that local authorities should be the first port of call, and I would encourage—and we always encourage—local authorities to take a proactive approach to intervention and to use those powers. But it's my belief that it is they who are best placed initially to do that.