Bearing in mind your remarks earlier over the focus on key stage 4, in particular the C to D grade boundary, what sort of minimum length of time should a programme like this run for if we are to expect success?
That's a hugely difficult question to answer, and it is at the core of whether this initiative was successful. There has been research, and people have looked at things like the City Challenge and have suggested that two or three years is too short a period to make a proper evaluation of how successful those particular initiatives were. I don't know of similar evaluations to that particular point in Wales for the Schools Challenge Cymru, but with similar initiatives in England, the suggestion has been that you need at least three years to be able to evaluate it properly.
The Schools Challenge Cymru advisers, I understand that Estyn met with those termly through the programme. Can you explain how useful that engagement was, and also perhaps compare or contrast it to the ongoing engagement you have with the advisers from the regional consortia?
You know, the engagement we had with local authorities, and regional consortia, and with Schools Challenge Cymru advisers was not really a problem for us. That was fine. I think the engagement with each other was more of the issue, really. I think the challenge for Schools Challenge Cymru was that it was introduced at a time when regional consortia were just beginning. So, you had a period of time when it wasn't entirely clear what the responsibilities of regional consortia were, compared with local authorities. That has developed and clarified over time, but at that time it wasn't entirely clear. Plus, you were bringing in another player to the school improvement landscape. When all of those different agencies worked well together, then that was a positive thing for schools. When they were all saying the same thing, having that extra resource, extra money, extra attention, was a positive thing; but, clearly, in some cases, that relationship didn't always work, and some schools felt that they were being told different things by different agencies. Clearly, that was one of the reasons why that wasn't as successful.