It could be one of the contributory factors. What I think is important is that there is no one, single reason why there seems to be less resilience in this cohort of children.
Will you be speaking to the exam boards about this and raising concerns?
I have written to Qualifications Wales, we've had discussions about it, but I've asked them to formally submit evidence ahead of my policy board for May, where, as I said, we will be doing a formal, deep-dive discussion across the department about these issues. But, again, Hefin, what we've got to be clear on is—while we look at overall factors, you know, our overall national statistic—we did see some schools last year whose FSM performance was better than it had been the year before. So, what was it in those schools that enabled those children to do really well, whereas, in other schools, the performance was different? Even in individual cities, you can see a huge variety of performance. So, take Cardiff and Swansea, our two biggest cities. You've got schools in those cities with comparative levels of free school meals. So, you could have really high-performing schools with a very small number of the cohort on free school meals. The difference between those performances in a single city—so, that's the same local education authority and the same regional consortium—you can see a massive change. There's one school I can talk to: their free-school-meal performance is 88 per cent. A similar school in the same city with the same proportion of children on free school meals, their performance is down in the 20 per cents. So, I think what's important is that we can't draw broad-brush conclusions. For me, the challenge is to go into individual schools and understand what was happening in that particular school that ensured that their children did really well. We've got one school in Swansea, their FSM performance at GCSE level 2 outperforms non-FSM pupils.
But we still need to rely on the trends from a distance. If we take your argument that 2017 was an unusual year and the trends up to 2016 were positive, in a few years' time, when we will be looking back in two years' time, how are we going to measure this progress, say, in 2019? What are we likely to see and what methods are you going to use to measure progress that way?