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.
Thank you. Gareth.
Thank you very much. The WJEC does provide what's required in a regulatory sense, and there are two things there—the specification, which tends to be very comprehensive in providing guidance in terms of drawing up a programme of teaching, and also exemplar assessments, which include marking, and those go to the regulator before they are published. So, those samples go to the regulator. The WJEC also do invest a great deal in resources that we produce digitally in both languages simultaneously. Each new course has substantial teaching guidance, which includes a great deal of useful information for teachers and pupils. And we run a professional development programme for teachers that is free of charge when courses are new, and then annually there is some charge for those events. They are face-to-face events, or, increasingly, they are webinars. The WJEC also encourages publishers to take an interest in providing textbooks. We don't have a commercial agreement with publishers. Indeed, the regulations as they stand in Wales, Northern Ireland and England preclude examination bodies from having commercial links with providers of textbooks, but that is something that emerges from the three-nation regime that existed in terms of qualifications. So, that is one point that we noted as something that needs to be considered for Wales as we move forward, whether it would be possible—. As we are not talking about examination boards competing with each other in Wales for GCSE and A-levels, in passing, that is something that I would want to suggest may deserve review. We encourage publishers to take an interest. At the moment, these tend to be England-based—Hodder Education and Illuminate Education, for example—and then the Welsh Government does provide funding to the WJEC to support the process of providing Welsh-language versions for those textbooks. So, we use that funding to provide editorial support to the process, and also to pay for translation costs, and we give significant guidance in terms of terminology. We have a language services team including excellent editors and translators within the WJEC, and we work closely with external translators too, and we use translation technology increasingly, which facilitates a great many things. Beyond that, I think the WJEC does see the need for flexibility, particularly when difficulties arise, and you heard there of some of the methods used by Mike and others to get digital resources available earlier than the print versions. And I should also note perhaps that, as the WJEC is very much involved with stakeholders, we feel that we do have a contribution to make in terms of ideas for the future.