Ministering to Education E-Book

Leighton Andrews

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 644

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

'Important and highly readable....of interest around the world because it enables the reader to see education reform from a minister's perspective as very few books have done before.' - Sir Michael Barber Ministering to Education is the first book by a former Welsh Government Minister since the creation of the National Assembly in 1999. As Education Minister in the Welsh Government from 2009—2013, Leighton Andrews was twice named Welsh Politician of the Year. This is his enlightening, frank and readable account of the education reforms initiated in the early years of Carwyn Jones's period as First Minister, and the complex challenges that still lie ahead to make the Welsh education system as good as any in the world. Offering the inside story on the reform journey Wales embarked upon, Andrews controversially reveals how he deliberately brought the media into the debate on school ranking. He debates the decision to regrade exam results when English Language GCSE exams came under fire in 2012, and the effect such decisions have had in setting the education systems of England and Wales on diverging paths. Student tuition fees were another area where Andrews led Wales in a different direction from England. Following Michael Gove's departure as Westminster Education Secretary, Andrews questions whether Wales or England has fared better and suggests what should happen next.

Leseprobe

Contents

About Leighton AndrewsTitle PageDedicationForeword by Sir Michael BarberIntroductionAppointed Minister for Children, Education and Lifelong LearningSetting the DirectionLeading ChangeRemoving Distractions – Funding the FutureAvoiding Distractions: No AcademiesThree Clear PrioritiesFrom School Effectiveness to School ImprovementLocal DeliveryA World-Class WorkforceQualifications ReformMichael Gove and the War on WalesEnglish Language GCSECurriculum Reform and Cultural Choices: Unfinished BusinessLearning in a Digital WorldA Living LanguageAdapt or DieThe New Higher Education PolicyTuition Fees and FundingSkills for EmploymentDevolution, Difference – and DeliveryAcknowledgementsGlossaryBibliographical EssayFurther ReadingChronologyCopyright

Leighton Andrews has been the Assembly Member for the Rhonddasince 2003. A former Head of Public Affairs at the BBC in London, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Westminster and an Honorary Professor at Cardiff University. He was Carwyn Jones’ campaign manager in the Welsh Labour leadership election in 2009, and convened the steering group for the Yes campaign in the 2011 referendum.

Ministering to Education

A Reformer Reports

Leighton Andrews

Foreword by Sir Michael Barber

For the leaders of change in our schools, colleges, universities and local authorities

Foreword

Sir Michael Barber

Ministering to Educationis an important and highly readable contribution to the literature on reforming education systems. It will of course be of great interest to those involved in the education system in Wales, whether as politicians, officials, teachers or parents. I also believe it will be of interest around the world because it enables the reader to see education reform from a minister’s perspective, as very few books have done before.

The appointment of Leighton Andrews as Minister for Education in the Welsh Assembly Government was a powerful signal from Carwyn Jones, the First Minister, that for the education sector business as usual in Wales was over and transformation would begin. As is recounted in the book, I first met Leighton shortly after his appointment and was impressed by his grasp of the state of affairs. He knew that the performance of the education system in Wales was unacceptably poor – and was willing to speak plainly about the way things were. I also recognised a politician who had the courage to act, even if some sacred cows would need to be slaughtered along the way.

In the decade or so between the creation of the Welsh Assembly and Leighton’s appointment, in relation to education, the government in Wales had in effect chosen to be ‘not England’. Tests and published test results abolished. No targets. No new forms of school such as academies. Power in effect left firmly in the hands of traditional local authorities and teachers. The result, as international comparisons began to show, was that Wales fell behind. Wales’s performance at secondary level in 2010 was worse than that of the lowest performing English region. Leighton was determined to change that – he knew what every progressive citizen of Wales knew – that the success of Wales in the twenty-first century would depend more than anything on the education of its people.

He also knew, given the distinctive culture and qualities of Wales, that the solution could not and should not be to ape what England had done. Instead, he chose to learn from it, adapt it where appropriate and ignore it where it did not make sense for Wales. Moreover, he recognised that England was just one country from which Wales could learn. What you find in these pages is a minister who is globally aware and shows an unusually deep knowledge of the research and writing on reforming education systems around the world.

I would highlight three major aspects of the book, though there is much else of interest including the stand-off with the government in England over GCSE, especially GCSE English, and changes in higher education too.

First, throughout the story Leighton’s determination to challenge the status quo, to reject mediocrity and to stand up for aspiration and standards shines through, even when on occasions it gets him into trouble. For example, in establishing a firm focus on literacy, numeracy and narrowing gaps in performance, Leighton learnt from England’s experience between 1997 and 2001 but also from Ontario’s experience between 2003 and 2013. He never wavered in pursuit of those goals even when the going got tough.

Second, while he knew it would be very difficult, he also refused to accept the status quo in relation to local government. In the mid-1990s, the government (in London) had, in an act of administrative madness, created twenty two local authorities in Wales when ten or twelve would have been quite sufficient. Most of them became mediocre institutions rarely willing to provide real challenge to the education system. They drained resources that might otherwise have been in the schools and smothered innovation. Until Leighton no one had been willing to tackle the problem, with the result that reform was long overdue.

Again he examined the path England had taken but refined and adapted it. He recognised that the stronger sense of social solidarity in Wales was a potential asset and therefore wanted a stronger middle tier rather than doing without one. In Blaenau Gwent he showed a willingness to intervene where necessary, sending a signal to the whole country that he expected more. The report he commissioned from Robert Hill gave him a constructive way forward which is now being implemented under his successor, Huw Lewis.

Third, in addition to making bold decisions, on the basis of a global evidence base and the needs of the hour, Leighton also concerned himself with implementation. He knew that unless reform had a real impact in classrooms across Wales, as well as in policy circles, the lives of children and young people would not be changed and his efforts would be in vain.

The ultimate outcomes – whether students learn more and achieve more – of his tenure as Minister of Education will be the acid test. Here, as Leighton recounts, there is some promising progress but as he would be the first to admit what we’ve seen so far is only the beginning and not nearly enough to fulfil the aspiration he has for Wales. Three years is not long enough to deliver irreversible reform, and the impact of, for example, the changes he made to GCSE cannot be known for years to come. My judgement would be that Leighton set education in Wales on a new and much more promising path and, whether that results in the much-hoped-for transformation, will depend on whether his successors pursue the path with the same vigour, determination and courage as Leighton did.

Either way, this book is instructive and tells a great story. It reveals vividly the challenges of being a minister; for example, being able to master the evidence base, the political context, the policy detail and the ability to communicate with stakeholders and the public not just over a period of time but also sometimes within a single day. As Leighton tells the story, he plays out the arguments he lived through and is often self-critical in ways that few contemporary memoirs do.

I hope thatMinistering to Educationwill be widely read. Even more, I hope that Wales will build on the achievements recounted in these pages and create an education system that becomes the envy of the world.

Sir Michael Barber

June 2014

Introduction

Education, as the Welsh cultural critic Raymond Williams reminded us inCulture & Society,is one of those words which gained its modern meaning during the Industrial Revolution. If I were writing a book on educational philosophy in Wales, I would draw on the writings of Raymond Williams and the even earlier pioneers of adult education, the founders of the Plebs’ League, the Central Labour Colleges, which gave Aneurin Bevan one of his first routes to publication, and the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). Amongst their observations and disputes many of the great questions about educational practice were addressed in ways which are still relevant today. Their debates around adult education were communitarian in focus, unsurprisingly, given how many of their leaders, such as Noah Ablett and W.H. Mainwaring, were drawn from the Unofficial Reform Committee in the Rhondda which gave birth, just over a century ago, toThe Miners’ Next Step.The community socialist traditions of the South Wales valleys sit uncomfortably with the often libertarian individualism of much of educational philosophy, even today, and would find some of it self-indulgent and lacking in rigour.

This is not, however, a book on educational philosophy. Nor is it intended to be an academic book. But I hope that it will be useful to academics as well as practitioners. I hope it will be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about the shaping of education policy in Wales. I hope that the book will also provide insights into the operation and culture of devolved policy-making and public administration in Wales, as well as the interaction between a devolved government and a UK government at a time of significant policy divergence.

I believe that I am the first former minister in any of the Welsh governments since 1999 to write a book-length account of any of their periods as a minister. I hope others will follow. We need more reflection on devolved politics – on what has gone well and on what has gone wrong – away from the self-important rhetoric of the Assembly Chamber and the glib simplicities of a TV studio. I began work on this book a few weeks after I left the Welsh Government on 25th June 2013. I had always intended to write an account of my time as Education Minister in Wales at some stage in the future. I just didn’t expect the opportunity to come so soon!

Inevitably, much has had to be left out. I have focused on the main areas of reform – schools, further and higher education, qualifications, the Welsh language – as well as key responsibilities in my own portfolio where there were specific policy differences with London. Even here, I have had to edit ruthlessly. I have sketched in outline matters where there is more to do, such as the curriculum.

Like any former minister, I am restricted by the Ministerial Code, and have therefore principally relied on published sources. Anyone hoping for juicy titbits from Cabinet meetings will be disappointed. However, the period of the book covers some interesting moments in the development of devolution in Wales.

The story begins during the One Wales Coalition government of Labour and Plaid Cymru. Carwyn Jones’s leadership victory in December 2009 had enabled us to refresh the image of Welsh Labour eighteen months before the Assembly election. Our ambition in 2009 was to build on the leadership election victory and deliver a full victory in the Assembly elections of 2011. Positioning Carwyn as a Leader for the whole of Wales was key to this, of course, but his own decision to make education a key plank of his leadership election manifesto gave us new energy in the 2011 Assembly election in which education policy featured strongly, and in which we won an additional four seats, taking us from twenty six to thirty out of the sixty seats in the National Assembly.

Our election preparations began in 2010, alongside the referendum campaign which delivered full law-making powers for the National Assembly in March 2011. Our key 2011 campaign theme –Standing up for Wales– was firmly in our minds by the summer of 2010. In December 2010 at Carwyn’s request I attended a meeting of Ed Miliband’s Shadow Cabinet where electoral strategy for 2011 – English local elections, Welsh and Scottish elections – was being discussed. I was amused to find that the same theme –Standing up for Communities– had been developed in England as well, after significant investment in focus group research. I said that we had also determined our slogan through a focus group in Wales – in our case, a focus group of Welsh Government ministers and advisers in a pub near the Assembly.

In May 2010 the Conservative-led UK coalition government was elected, meaning we had a very different policy context within which to operate. Manifesto options for the 2011 Assembly election were outlined at the Welsh Labour special policy conference in November 2010. The education section of the policy platform highlighted Carwyn’s central commitment to raising the funding going into schools. In introducing this section of the document I highlighted the dividing lines now emerging between Welsh Labour and the coalition in England, such as the development of free schools. I was able to confirm that local authorities had also committed to delegate more of the money they received from the Welsh Government to their schools. This pre-manifesto document, however, appeared before we published our plans on tuition fees and before the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 results were published in December 2010. The final manifesto in 2011 had much more detail in these areas in particular. Some of our key commitments became central Labour campaign pledges – including the commitment that no Welsh student should pay higher tuition fees in real terms than if they had been a student in 2010-11, and the commitment to raise funding to schools by 1 per cent above the percentage increase in the block grant to Wales.

Of course, policies do not arrive fully-formed overnight. There is a cycle of policy development. This can involve the shaping of an initial idea, sometimes by a minister or an official, or a political party or a think tank, or a lobby group such as a union or charity. Then there is the process of manifesto preparation and adoption. After the election, if the proposal makes it into the legislative programme, there will be consultation, policy instructions to government lawyers, the preparation of legislation, then the passage of that legislation through the Assembly, and finally the preparation of regulations or statutory guidance deriving from the legislation. Not all policies require legislation. Some programmes, such as Jobs Growth Wales can be developed and delivered quickly. But others, such as my reforms to the procedures which governed the closure of schools, took three and a half years from conception to final implementation.

It was only after May 2011 that we were able to embark on a fully Labour education policy, with the ending of the One Wales coalition government. Even then we were, in practice, a minority government. In the run-up to the 2011 Assembly election, Plaid Cymru had started to distance themselves from us on education policies. Their leader, Ieuan Wyn Jones, in June 2010, and their education spokesperson, Nerys Evans, in March 2011, both made keynote speeches on education. I got on well with Nerys, but I was amused when she tried to claim Plaid was responsible for the Foundation Phase, 14-19 Learning Pathways and the Welsh Baccalaureate, as those had been developed before the One Wales government. I joked in the Assembly ‘I was interested to see that all the things that had been done in education that she liked had been carried out by a Plaid Government and that all the things that she did not like had been carried out by Labour Ministers.’ Amongst other things, Plaid made it clear that they would not go along with our proposal for a national grading system for schools if they were in government in the next Assembly term.

On my reappointment as Education Minister following the 2011 election, theWestern Maileditorial was headlined ‘Leighton’s a tough teacher, but he has the right lessons for our schools.’ I was very clear that I had unfinished business. I was able to carry through many of the key elements of our manifesto before I left the government in June 2013, and put in place the plans for legislation to underpin a number of other areas.

You rapidly find, as a minister, that when Opposition parties are not criticising you for not doing enough and not having done it by yesterday, they are criticising you for doing too much and doing it too fast. Sometimes you simply have to put your head down and drive forward, ignoring the bufferings from all sides. You have to hold your nerve and stick to your strategy.

I was pleased to be succeeded by Huw Lewis, who had been my Deputy Minister from the period following Carwyn’s victory in the leadership election in December 2009 until the May 2011 Assembly election. I knew he shared my commitment to high standards for all, meaning that the impetus behind our reforms would be carried forward, supplemented by Huw’s personal commitment to addressing issues of tackling deprivation and inequality.

I was fortunate as Education Minister to work with some very talented people in government, in schools, colleges and universities in Wales, and in the education inspectorate, Estyn. I wish there were more space to thank the hundreds who were involved.

As Aneurin Bevan famously said, ‘This is my truth. Tell me yours.’

Appointed Minister for Children, Education and Lifelong Learning

As we waited for the official announcement of the Welsh Labour leadership result on the 1stDecember 2009, I looked across at Carwyn Jones, sitting in the rows opposite. He and his agent Mick Antoniw had been given the result earlier, in private. As his campaign manager, with the rest of the campaign team, I had just arrived at the Wales Millennium Centre (WMC). We didn’t know the result, though we were highly optimistic given our telephone canvassing returns. While we waited for the announcement, Carwyn mouthed something at me. I thought he was saying ‘effing lost’. It turned out later he had been saying ‘First ballot’. I will never make it as a lip-reader.

Carwyn undertook a long round of interviews after the official ceremony and speeches, then as we were about to leave the WMC to join Carwyn’s assembled supporters in the Eli Jenkins pub just across the way, a call came in. It was 10 Downing Street, with the Prime Minister on the line. Carwyn received Gordon Brown’s congratulations standing in the public space of the foyer of the WMC. There were few there to witness it.

Carwyn’s election came just over ten years after the opening of the National Assembly. It offered a chance to set a clear direction for the second decade of devolution. It certainly helped to renew the appeal of Welsh Labour. There was just one problem. We didn’t have a majority Labour government – we were in coalition with Plaid Cymru.

Carwyn had set out his own manifesto for the leadership of Welsh Labour during the campaign, under the slogan,Time to Lead. A number of us had contributed to the ideas in that manifesto, which was eventually pulled into shape by former Welsh Labour special adviser Cathy Owens. At the launch of the manifesto, well-managed by Cathy, David Taylor and Steve Jones, there was a focus on a specific pledge – that spending on education would rise each year by 1 per cent above the total percentage change in grant received by the Welsh Government from the UK government. I had never been entirely certain how that pledge arose. I understood it had been developed by Carwyn, together with Jane Davidson, then Environment Minister and formerly Education Minister from 2000-2007. I interrogated Carwyn on the pledge as we planned the launch of the manifesto. ‘One per cent of what?’, I asked him when the idea was first aired. I was worried that we would be pulled up on the cost of the commitment and also not clear whether we could honour it during the lifetime of the One Wales government. We nailed down what it meant. The one per cent commitment, once clarified, helped to give Carwyn’s campaign clear definition – and it was obvious that education would be a priority for the government he led.

Carwyn was aware that I hoped to take on the education brief in his Cabinet. By then I had served for two and a half years as a Deputy Minister, first with responsibility for housing, in the six or seven weeks of Rhodri Morgan’s minority Labour government established in late May 2007. Once the One Wales coalition with Plaid Cymru was formed in early July that year, I had become the Deputy Minister for Regeneration, working across the two government departments of Economy and Transport, as deputy to Plaid Cymru leader Ieuan Wyn Jones, and Social Justice and Local Government, as deputy to Labour Minister Dr Brian Gibbons. I had thoroughly enjoyed this portfolio, which addressed issues I had worked on earlier in my life when I was the UK Campaign Director for the 1987 UN International Year of Shelter for the Homeless.

I’d had some experience of the education department in the course of Cabinet Committee and other ministerial meetings on public service delivery and welfare reform. My officials in Regeneration and in Communities First had had to develop relationships with the department as getting people into paid work was a key task in regenerating communities. We saw regeneration as being about people as much as it was about place. The JobMatch programme, operating under the City Strategy pathfinder programme, established by UK Labour ministers in the Department of Work and Pensions, was one element where Regeneration officials had been in the lead. Relations with the education department had not always been harmonious while this programme was being developed. I had also had some serious doubts about the department’s analytical capability, having seen their calculations around childcare needs in the welfare reform area.

Over the previous decade of devolution, the education department had developed a number of creative and pioneering policies, particularly around curriculum development, including the Foundation Phase, the Welsh Baccalaureate and the 14-19 Learning Pathways. The Foundation Phase, initial work on which began under Rosemary Butler, as Assembly Secretary for pre-16 Education and Children, and developed under Jane Davidson, provided a new approach to the education of 3 to 7-year-olds relevant to their development, placing great emphasis on learning by doing, aiming to develop young people’s self-esteem and confidence through play and active involvement in problem-solving, and to inculcate a positive approach to learning. My predecessor as Education Minister, Jane Hutt, had delivered additional funding for the programme because its reliance on large numbers of teaching assistants absorbed more revenue than had originally been budgeted.

The Welsh Baccalaureate gave young people broader experiences than simply vocational qualifications or academic study. It combined personal development skills with existing qualifications and was designed to give young people experience of the world of work, community projects, and personal research-based investigation.

The 14-19 Learning Pathways were designed to ensure that all young people had tailored support whatever course they took, with a wide choice of options, designed to break down the barriers between vocational and academic learning, and to boost the number of young people going on to higher level qualifications. The plans were developed by Jane Davidson with additional work by her Deputy Minister Christine Chapman in 2005, and were taken forward in the Learning and Skills Measure piloted through the Assembly by the Deputy Minister for Skills, John Griffiths, in 2008-9.

The first decade of the Assembly had therefore been one where a new Welsh education agenda was developed – what Professor David Reynolds had called ‘a distinctive Welsh way for our education policies’. Jane Davidson’s White PaperThe Learning Countryset out the outline of that approach in 2001 – its title borrowed from a 1999 paper on adult education by Hywel Francis and Rob Humphreys.

The first two Welsh Assembly Governments, as they were called at the time, had also made significant policy departures in other areas in the first decade – reinstating student grants, with the introduction of the Assembly Learning Grant, the development of a more generous approach to tuition fee support for Welsh students studying in Wales from 2005, and approaches to intensive early years support in some of Wales’s poorest communities, through the Flying Start programme.

My philosophy of education was very simple. It was that a child in Maerdy in my Rhondda constituency, one of the most deprived communities in Wales, should have the same life chances as a child in Monmouth, one of the richest parts of Wales. To achieve this demanded activist politics – but then, that is why we in the Labour Party are in politics. I was fed up of excuses and alibis. Too often we heard the most blatant and outrageous socio-economic determinism – that you couldn’t expect kids from these backgrounds to do well, that poverty would always hold these communities back, or you couldn’t expect schools to overcome the challenges of a chaotic or dysfunctional family environment. That just made me angry. Sometimes excuses came in a more sugar-coated form: academic results might be poor, but the school surveys of wellbeing were terrific, or they had a top-rating for their pastoral care.

Yet there were teachers and head teachers out there who were performing extraordinarily well in schools in deprived communities. In Treorchy in my own constituency, first under Bethan Guilfoyle and now Rhys Jones. In Sandfields in Neath Port Talbot. In St. Mary Immaculate in Cardiff under Marc Belli’s leadership. In 2013, in Llanwern High in Newport under Peter Jenkins. In Rhyl High, under Claire Armitstead. In primary schools like Hafod in Swansea, led by Rachael Webb; Barry Island then Cadoxton under Janet Hayward; Herbert Thompson Primary in Ely, led by Bethan Hocking and Rhos y Medre near Wrexham under Liz Edwards. These heads took responsibility: they didn’t duck it or find excuses. When Ferndale Community School, based in the Maerdy ward, became the first secondary school in Wales to move from Band 5 to Band 1 in 2013, under the dynamic leadership of head teacher Heather Nicholas, I felt we were really getting somewhere.

Of course, we had to intervene in the community as well – and we needed a team around the family approach, like that of On Track in Tylorstown in the Rhondda Fach, pioneered by the late Mick Millman, not one that expected families to trek to a variety of services in a variety of locations. Huw Lewis pioneered the roll-out of the Families First programme. We made the commitment in the 2011 manifesto to double the spending on the Flying Start programme for 0 to 3-year-olds. We recognised the imbalances of wealth and power. We invested in parenting strategies. We stressed the importance of parents talking to children. We had results which showed that children who had been through the Flying Start programme were more likely to be attentive and well-behaved. We also supported free school breakfasts, to ensure that young people had a good start to the day, with research showing the link between good nutrition and better learning outcomes. As young people progressed through the system, we maintained support for the poorest, keeping the EMAs (Educational Maintenance Allowances) for the poorest young people post-16, maintaining Assembly Learning Grants for the poorest students, and later introducing the Pupil Deprivation Grant, aimed at breaking the gap between poverty and poor attainment levels.

But we knew that issues of power and wealth extended to access to information also. If our ambition was that every school should be a good school–and aspiring to be great–then we had to ensure parents and governors had some sense of what made a good school, and what each school should be capable of achieving, just as their children needed access to information on career options and the qualifications necessary to achieve those. Parents, particularly in deprived communities, often with few educational qualifications themselves, were not always in the best position to challenge professionals over performance. Too often, it seemed to me, local authority school improvement staff colluded in complacency rather than challenging it on behalf of parents. That was why we needed buy-in from local authority political leaderships to drive up standards. The state has a responsibility to equalise access to power, including information on performance and what it means. There were almost too many statistics in our system, making judgement for non-professionals difficult. We needed a simple range of measures which told communities what we thought their schools were capable of achieving and what they were actually achieving, and how progress was being measured over time. Secondary banding was to give us that. The problem remains in our primary schools, but now at least local authorities have measures which are meaningful and challenging.

At the core of my philosophy then, was that we should demand high standards for all – we should never tolerate a system which condemned any young people to failure in Wales. We believed in the comprehensive system. We had far fewer middle-class withdrawals from the state system than in England. The English system, inherited by New Labour in 1997, had division built into it from the start.

If we believed in the comprehensive system, then we had a duty to make it work. We had to ensure successful schools with a balanced intake. That meant, by the way, tough decisions on closing poorly-performing schools that had been neglected for years by local authorities, since the evidence was that young people’s performance overall would generally be raised by switching them to a school which had higher standards; it also meant tough decisions on catchment areas to ensure social balance in the intakes.

It wasn’t only young people from deprived backgrounds who suffered from poorly performing schools. In 2011, David Cameron railed against coasting schools in the leafy suburbs of England. We had similar problems, and that was part of the reason why Monmouth’s education system was put into special measures by Estyn in 2013. They may have been getting good results on an all-Wales measure, but on the basis of what they should have been achieving, they were well behind the pace. Banding, particularly in the first two years, made parents think about performance. When Radyr Comprehensive in Cardiff was placed in Band 3 in the first year of banding, that sent a short sharp shock though the system. It had good GCSE scores on paper but should have been performing much better.

I made it clear in the first weeks of January 2010 that I wanted ‘a big emphasis on standards’, saying that we faced challenges on attainment and that I was more concerned about standards than structures. Although education was devolved, we deliberately flagged up some planned Welsh Labour initiatives in the 2010 UK General Election manifesto. These included a National Literacy Programme aimed at 7 to11-year-olds, recognising that improved literacy rates would increase school attendance and help pupils engage more widely with their learning as they progressed through school, and committing ourselves to ‘raise educational attainment’ overall.

In our 2011 Assembly manifesto, we set out a clear standards agenda for the first time, going into detail on our plans for grading of schools on a national basis, our clear focus on literacy and numeracy for all, backed by nationwide tests, the production of statutory guidance on school improvement, and our high aspirations for education workforce development including the new Master’s programme and the introduction of Teach First. In the 2007 Welsh Labour election manifesto, the word ‘standards’ did not feature. Attainment issues were raised only in the context of inequality in respect of gender or race or deprivation – there was no sense of this being a system-wide issue. In our 2003 manifesto, there had been talk of action that had been taken in the first Assembly term to reduce the gap between the best and worst-performing secondary schools and a vague promise to extend this to primary schools including a brief reference to ‘driving up standards’ through more literacy and numeracy schemes and by extending out-of-school and homework clubs. This gave the impression that attainment and standards issues could be tackled through isolated initiatives, not a national system-wide focus.

Perhaps I should say a word about my own educational experiences. I went to state schools in Wales and then England. I started in primary school in Barry Island on 3rd September 1962, just a few weeks after my fifth birthday. As an August baby, initially I must have been one of the oldest in my year, but after a couple of years a policy change led me to being bumped up a year and I ended as one of the youngest in the class. I enjoyed Barry Island. Taking the school bus daily from the Knap where we lived was something of an adventure. In 1967, after my father had been ill for two years, finally dying in September when I was just 10, my younger brother and I moved to Romilly School.

The next year my mother decided to move away from South Wales, to the town of Broadstone in Dorset where she had other relatives. Dorset was a selective county.

Instead of going to Barry Comprehensive, I found myself one of the few pupils in Romilly to have to sit the 11-plus. I sat the test on my own and remember the headmaster, Mr Morgan, discussing my reading preferences so that he could send a report to the powers that be. He teased me for still reading books by Enid Blyton. I passed the 11-plus and duly entered Poole Grammar, a single-sex school.

We arrived in Dorset a week or so before term started. Unlike other boys who had come up to the grammar school with friends from primary, I knew no one. Poole, I soon learned, was a very affluent area – Sandbanks and Branksome these days are where millionaires from football and entertainment often have homes. After my father’s death, throughout my secondary schooling, I was entitled to free school meals. I can bear out the stigmatistion of this experience – what the Child Poverty Action Group in the 1980s called the ‘Badge of Poverty’. As I told ITV Wales Political Editor Adrian Masters on theFace to Faceprogramme in December 2012, there was some verbal bullying, when a couple of boys in the art class decided to start calling me, a few months after Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, a ‘Welsh wog’.

I also knew nothing of the local area, so the early geography lessons which assumed a knowledge of Poole Harbour – one of the largest natural harbours in the world – were alien to me. In my first term I finished twenty-eighth out of thirty. I remember one boy asking me how my mother had reacted when I told her the result. The next term I was twenty-sixth out of thirty. By the end of the year I had clawed my way up to fifteenth in the year. In the fourth form – what we would now describe as year 10 – pupils were streamed into five classes – 4 Arts, 4 Science, the middle stream 4 General, and 4 Design and 4 Engineering (if I remember these accurately). After my third year exams, the head teacher recorded in my annual report ‘he has won his place in 4 Arts’. The school practised what we would now term ‘early entry’ for O levels, and I sat three in the fourth form in English, Maths and French, passing them all.

My brother, four years younger than me, did not pass the 11-plus, largely, I think, due to exam anxiety. I have hated selective education ever since. The 11-plus divides families, separates young people on the basis of an absurdly early judgement, and is an arbitrary test that people can fail for all sorts of reasons on the day. Confidence, as academics from the London School of Economics (LSE) have recently shown, is key to academic success.

I therefore agreed wholeheartedly when, in December 2013, the chief inspector of schools in England, Sir Michael Wilshaw, attacked the concept of state-funded grammar schools, saying that they served only the top 10 per cent of the population at the expense of the poorest, with a tiny percentage of their pupils on free school meals (FSM) – 3 per cent and were ‘stuffed full of middle-class kids’. Indeed, Sutton Trust figures released in November 2013 put the figure at 2.7 per cent FSM against 17.5 per cent in other state schools in England.

My brother never got on with his secondary education, leaving school at sixteen. Subsequently he started an Open University course and won a place at Ruskin College with the assistance of his trade union. He then went to Cardiff University and got a First. Dr Geoff Andrews is now the author of several books, including one on Berlusconi’s Italy, and another on the Slow Food Movement, a senior fellow at the Open University frequently appearing on the BBC and Sky or the Italian media to talk about Italian politics or on the Radio 4Food Programmeto discuss local food initiatives, or championing the rights of football fans through the organisation Philosophy Football.

My mother, Peggy, bravely retrained as a primary school teacher, in the 1970s, while bringing us up on her own, taking courses first at Poole Technical College then at Teacher Training College in Salisbury. We were and are very proud of what she achieved. Her work as a teacher took place mainly in Dorset, though later in Wales, including as a supply teacher in some of the most deprived schools in Cardiff.

I realise now that throughout my secondary schooling I was clinging on to the lost but remembered cultural moorings of Wales, cheering Welsh success at rugby, Glamorgan’s county championship victory in 1969, and the occasional pop-chart appearances of a variety of Welsh icons, and sharing from afar the general disappointment of John Toshack’s move to Liverpool from Cardiff in 1970. The road back to Wales commenced when I was accepted at University College, Cardiff, to study English: but I messed up my English A level despite gaining an S-Level in the same subject. Cardiff were prepared to take me to study History – but I knew a couple of people who were going to the University College of North Wales, Bangor, and I thought that I might have a chance of switching to English and History if I took up a place there through clearing. So it proved. Clearing worked for me, just as it works for thousands of other young people every year. I drove to Bangor with a friend who had also suffered over the 11-plus, Bill Gow. His twin brother had passed the exam and been a fellow pupil of mine from the first-form at Poole, while Bill only joined us in the sixth form. How many talents were wasted by that divisive 11-plus exam? We will never know.

Because of our circumstances, growing up in a one-parent family, I went to Bangor on a full grant. At Bangor, I came into contact with the Welsh language – not for the first time, but certainly for the first time on a meaningful basis – being heavily involved in protests against the college’s bilingual policy in 1976, along with Vaughan Roderick, now Welsh Affairs Editor at BBC Wales, and the first woman President of UCNW Bangor Students’ Union, Ann Beynon – now BT’s Director for Wales, amongst her many different roles.

I became heavily involved in student politics, active in the students’ union, a sabbatical officer in 1978 and elected in 1979 to the national executive of the National Union of Students in the UK, serving first as a part-time officer then as the sabbatical Vice President Welfare. My NUS contemporaries included former Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) chair and TV producer Trevor Phillips,TheTimescolumnist and former BBC Editor David Aaronovitch, current Labour MPs Fiona MacTaggart and Richard Burden, former Scottish First Minister Jack McConnell, current Pontypridd AM Mick Antoniw and current Conservative Minister Anna Soubry MP.

My first degree was in English and History, where I found that the joint honours structure failed adequately to synthesise the two disciplines. I became interested in the agenda of cultural studies and people’s history, and the work of cultural critics such as Raymond Williams and historians like E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill. I then found a Master’s course at Sussex University, with modules based on Raymond Williams’ culturalKeywords, and began there in the autumn of 1979, leaving Wales for the second time not long after the referendum defeat and Mrs Thatcher’s election victory. At the same time I had started to discover a generation of iconoclastic Welsh historians, to a degree grouped around the journalLlafur, whose writings had helped me understand what it was to be Welsh in the late twentieth-century, and whose rooted communitarian socialist philosophy had no truck with the vacuous romantic libertarian individualism so prevalent on the British left in the 1980s and 1990s. One of those historians, whom I had already ‘read’ with great enthusiasm and personal recognition, Dai Smith, was to pop up in the BBC at the other end of the M4 while I was getting my intellectual grounding in public service reform at the Corporation’s headquarters in London in the early 1990s.

State education served me well. I am determined it should serve all our young people well.

One of the things that I came to find most irritating when I became education minister was how often the media sought to personalise the politics of education, trying to force me into criticisms of my predecessors. I defended them and their achievements throughout. This is part of the modern media’s attempt to simplify every policy in terms of personality. The truth is that ministers face different challenges at different times. They have to conduct policies in the context of collective responsibility. They are bound by legislation, by the funding available, by the arithmetic of seats in the Assembly, by party policy, by Cabinet agreement. In terms of our education policies between 1999 and 2009, when I took over, and the period until my departure in 2013, there were far more continuities in policy terms than fractures – not least, for example, in terms of policy towards higher education. It is these fractures or revisions which interest the media, not the continuities. In general, I believe individuals as ministers can make a difference. But context, often, is all.

Consider this: In Rosemary Butler’s year as Minister for pre-16 education, the Assembly was a corporate body barely sure of its own powers. During Jane Davidson’s entire period as Education Minister, while education responsibilities in many areas were devolved, primary law-making powers of the kind we obtained in stages under the 2006 Government of Wales Act did not exist, and much of education was, for most of Jane’s period, under the direction of non-governmental public bodies or quangos, such as the curriculum and assessment quango, ACCAC, and the education and training quango, ELWA – and she had to put up with the corporate body model of the Assembly throughout her entire time as Education Minister, as well as a coalition with the Lib-Dems from 2000-2003 and a minority Labour government after 2005. Her successor, Jane Hutt, and her Deputy Minister John Griffiths, had to operate under the One Wales coalition government with the complicated model of obtaining authorisation to legislate in new fields by first getting a Legislative Competence Order approved through the Assembly and through Parliament, and then passing a Measure through the Assembly. That was the model in operation when I became Education Minister, and we only gained the power to legislate in all areas of the 2006 Act after the March 2011 referendum – in practice, after the May 2011 Assembly election. The Education (Wales) Measure was the final Measure under the pre-referendum system. The School Standards and Organisation Act 2013 was Wales’s first Education Act.

Even then, policy autonomy can be circumscribed, as we shall see. The interpretation of European law by the Office of National Statistics had implications for our desired policy objectives on further education governance; the close integration of our higher education system with that of England, based on the choices of students from Wales and England, limited the range of realistic policy options open to us after the UK government decided to raise tuition fees in England; and the sharing of qualifications with England and Northern Ireland meant difficult negotiations with regulators in those jurisdictions, particularly with Ofqual in England after 2010.

After the leadership election, Carwyn had been working on his cabinet appointments for a few days with former Welsh Government Special Adviser Jane Runeckles. Jane had privately told Carwyn a year or so before that if he wanted to be elected First Minister, then he needed me as his campaign manager. We had met for lunch to discuss Carwyn’s chances. Knowing the complexity of the electoral college for the leadership, he needed broad support. ‘Can he get any backing from the unions?’ I asked. ‘UNISON will back him’, Jane replied confidently. So it proved.

Ministerial appointments generally take place in the First Minister’s office on the first floor of the Welsh Government offices in Cathays Park – the old CP1 building, as it is known internally. It was there that Rhodri Morgan had asked me to become Deputy Minister for Social Justice and Public Service Delivery in 2007 – though subsequently when the One Wales coalition was formed, my appointment as Deputy Minister for Regeneration was made by telephone, as I was in the Rhondda at the time. A number of us were in touch when we found out we had been asked to go and see the First Minister on Thursday 10thDecember. Carl Sargeant, Lesley Griffiths and I met in the Hilton Hotel, just down the road from Cathays Park. When my turn came to see him, Carwyn asked me, with Jane Runeckles in attendance, to take on the role of Minister for Children, Education and Lifelong Learning. Huw Lewis was to be my deputy, with responsibility for Children specifically. I soon learned Carl was taking over Local Government, and Lesley would be Deputy Minister for Science and Skills. The news was released at around 4 p.m. and a Ministerial photocall followed not long after.

Cabinet Ministers are supported by a Private Office, headed normally by a Senior Private Secretary. Mine was Helen Childs, who had been working in the same capacity for Jane Hutt, and knew the department well. She had also in the past worked for Carwyn when he was Environment Minister. The team under Helen included two further Private Secretaries, one of whom supported Huw, a Diary Secretary and two Assistant Diary Secretaries, again one supporting Huw. I asked that Rhian Atkinson, who had been my Private Secretary when I was Deputy Minister for Regeneration, join Helen’s team, as she was accustomed to working with me.

My first priority was to get a grip on the diary. I realised that I would be taking over meetings and events previously scheduled not just for Jane Hutt, but also for John Griffiths who had been Deputy Minister for Skills. I went through the diary with Helen and Rhian late that afternoon because I wanted to get a strong hold on the issues facing the department at the outset. In his entertaining bookHow to be a Minister,Gerald Kaufman wrote: ‘He who controls the minister’s diary controls his life. So it had better be you.’ Out went a long list of forward engagements that I scrapped as I determined to keep a focus on the big picture.

Special advisers, technicallytemporarycivil servants exempt from certain requirements of the civil service code – with a brief to undertake political work – finished in their posts on the resignation of a First Minister. A number had been renewed for an initial three months and the special adviser supporting me was Ian Butler, a professor at Bath University, who worked part-time. That evening he sent me through some suggestions on what he thought I should discuss with the Director General of the department the next day. I had a long list of my own. Ian’s issues included the School Effectiveness Framework, which he saw as key to raising standards (I was glad to see that word), school closures and funding, the funding of the Foundation Phase, childcare, the national bursary framework for students, youth service funding and the children’s plan. My priorities were Carwyn Jones’s manifesto commitments, particularly funding, literacy and the department’s policy and delivery capacity. We had run Carwyn’s campaign on a series of themes headed ‘Time to…,’ culminating inTime to Lead. Now, it was Time to Deliver.

Setting the Direction

I arrived at my fifth floor office in Ty Hywel, Cardiff Bay on Friday December 11thwith a firm view of the challenges. First, establishing a clear direction and priorities for the department itself; making a start on delivering Carwyn’s funding commitment; a strong drive forward on the new higher education strategy; starting to examine the delivery of education through the twenty two local education authorities; and finally, beginning to communicate the new focus for the department to all those working in the education system in Wales, and to the wider Welsh public.

Ministers need to be able to lead on policy, and to do that they need to have a sound view of their priorities, a close eye on their budgets, clear understanding of the legal boundaries to their powers, a real overview of the issues likely to come at them from within the department and good intelligence on what is happening within the sector, both in Wales and at a UK level. Ministers also need to know how to turn policy into delivery. That requires a sound grasp of forward planning, setting clear timescales and demanding precise critical paths from officials as to when a policy announcement will actually come into force, and clarity on the processes and work-streams and key stages involved in delivering that. Take tuition fees as an example – the policy, announced at the end of November 2010, only began to benefit the first cohort of Welsh students in the autumn of 2012. The policy I announced on school closures in June 2010 was not completed until the passage of the School Standards and Organisation Act in early 2013.

I commissioned a great deal of reading material in my first few days and my in tray was soon filled with lilac MB (Ministerial Briefing) folders, light green SFs (Submission Folders) and, new to me, as I hadn’t had legislation to deal with as a Deputy Minister, orange LFs (Legislative Folders). Dark green correspondence folders filled up rapidly and I made myself unpopular with some officials when I complained about grammar, syntax and basic literacy issues in my correspondence. But if the Education Minister didn’t complain about the written standard of draft correspondence, then who would? I made Huw Lewis laugh when I described myself in ironic terms as ‘the guardian of the nation’s literacy’.

My first meeting with the Director General of the department, David Hawker, would, I knew, set the tone. David had been Assistant Chief Executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, and before that the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority, from 1995-1999. Immediately prior to joining the civil service, David was Deputy chief executive and Director of Children’s Services at Westminster City Council (2007-2008) and Director of Children’s Services in Brighton & Hove (2001-7), where he started as Director of Education in 1999. He was a former modern languages teacher. He ran through the issues that were on his agenda, including forthcoming legislative and funding issues. He was one of a group of new Director Generals appointed by the then Permanent Secretary, Gill Morgan.

Having heard him out, I made it clear that I felt there was a real lack of urgency in the department. It was dysfunctional and not operating in a strategic fashion. I felt that there were too many empires within it, and insufficient focus on One Wales and Ministerial priorities. I thought some of the papers I had seen going to Cabinet Committees were weak. I wanted a moratorium on strategies and non-statutory consultations. I requested a line-by-line examination of the department’s budget, and set up a meeting for the following Monday to go through budgets with David and his senior directors, with the objective of identifying £100 million of savings which could be redeployed to key priorities, not least to free up funds for a stronger literacy programme. Privately I didn’t expect them to find £100 million, but setting a target would force everyone to look forensically at what was feasible. This forward commitments review uncovered some £88 million of uncommitted spend in the 2010-11 financial year, including £25 million capital. I made it clear that I was open to alternative sources of funding for school-building, and for further and higher education capital projects. I said I did not rule out the central financing of schools, and commissioned some policy work on that.

I also told David that I would be establishing a monthly policy board to examine thorny issues. The first item to be tackled would be policy on school closures, and I would expect all policy leads to attend. I wanted to ensure all key departmental policy leads shared in the collective challenges facing the department, to break down what I was already learning was something of a silo mentality.

I was determined that the department would improve its implementation. I worried that it suffered from the same disease that Michael Barber had identified in Whitehall: ‘When asked for a plan, Whitehall’s traditional response is to write some thoughtful prose, and if it really wants to impress the recipient, to enclose the prose in a glossy cover.’

My mantra for the department in that first year – soon to be obvious to all from the whiteboard in my office – was ‘Better implementation; fewer initiatives; keep it simple’. As I said in interviews and articles in my first few weeks, ‘Wales is a small country. I’m sure we can be simpler and smarter in the way we make things happen in education’. I told David that I wanted to reduce the number of consultations, reduce the paperwork going out to schools, and stop the production of what were usually called strategies – though too often were simply aspirational policy statements. I asked how many publications to schools were planned between December and June, and from then until the May 2011 election. The answer that came back to me was ‘186, minister, 93 before June’. I ordered a 50 per cent reduction. Arbitrary, I know, but sometimes you simply have to make a clear decision to stop people wasting time haggling.

Meetings had been arranged with the divisional directors in the department: Chris Tweedale, who led on children, schools and young people, a cheerful, bearded northerner, ex-head teacher and geography teacher; Lynne Hamilton, highly competent Scotswoman, full of insight, who headed the department’s finance, corporate planning and student finance departments; Dennis Gunning, director of SHELL (Skills, Higher Education and Lifelong Learning) another Scot, wiry, pragmatic and with vast experience of post-16 education in the UK and internationally. Sadly, I never got to meet Mike Clancy, who headed the Curriculum division, husband of the Assembly Commission’s chief executive Claire Clancy, as he was already seriously ill and tragically died in February 2010.

It was obvious from the beginning that Chris Tweedale enjoyed working around politicians and knew the value of what, in US Presidential politics, is called ‘face time’ with them. Chris had been seconded to work with the Department for Education in London and had also served time in the delivery unit run by Michael Barber. I had already begun to explore the possibility of getting Michael Barber in to run a seminar on priority-setting for my senior officials. I had read and enjoyed his bookInstruction to Deliveron his time running the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit. The ebullient Dr Tim Williams, who had served me as specialist adviser on regeneration, had worked with Michael when they were both NUT staffers, and again when Tim was special adviser to David Miliband, and had already opened up lines of communication for me. Tim –Dr. Noin the 1997 Welsh referendum campaign – had become a convert to devolution by the time of the 2011 referendum and was a constant source of rewarding, entertaining and creative ideas in the regeneration field and later in education too.

My first discussion of substance was with Lynne Hamilton in Cathays Park. As I walked into CP2, the more modern end of the Welsh Government Cathays Park complex, I ran into a mid-ranking civil servant whom I knew from another government department. He told me the message had got out clearly that the times were changing, expectations were different and there was no question who was setting the agenda for the department. Early in January 2010, Dennis Gunning told me candidly that the department needed time to adjust to my style. ‘You must let us get used to your approach. It’s very different. I’m not saying that’s bad, but it is very different,’ he told me. I told officials ‘My biggest weakness is my impatience. But my impatience is also my biggest strength.’ It gets things done.

I have always hated bureaucracy. My background before coming into elected politics in Wales in 2003 had principally been in charities focused on campaigning and in small businesses providing direct and immediate services to clients. Even during my time at the BBC, I had the privilege of running a small unit which was able to operate in guerrilla style to put across the BBC’s corporate policies to Westminster and Brussels. Within bureaucracies – and you will see this all the time in Welsh local government, the land of little empires – too often you find process stifling creativity, slowing down decisions, with power trips preventing effective collaboration and innovation. I was determined the Education Department would work speedily, effectively and openly.

Lynne Hamilton came to see me in the spare meeting room allocated at the time to Ministers just down the corridor in CP1 from the First Minister’s office. She had already heard that alternative sources of finance could now be considered for school buildings, and that I was looking for serious savings in departmental budgets. She warned me that would be difficult to do, as the department was already carrying ‘pressures’ – civil service-speak for unfunded costs – which would need to be met, not least in the student finance area, which of course was largely demand-led. I discussed with her a programme for line-by-line review of budgets, going through the full detail and getting to understand precisely how much was being spent on each item. A series of meetings were held before Christmas which made it crystal clear to me that not all senior officials had a tight grip on every expenditure heading in their divisions. If they didn’t know what the money was being spent on, I mused, how could I be confident it was being used for the right purposes. I couldn’t see how they could demonstrate that budgets were aligned with One Wales or Ministerial priorities. There were to be further budget meetings, one of them stormy and short, over the next few months.

There were initially ministerial boundary issues to resolve – Lesley Griffiths as deputy minister for Science and Skills, was responsible to Deputy First Minister Ieuan Wyn Jones. We had to work out quickly a modus operandi which gave us both clarity over our areas of responsibility. That was never a problem for Lesley and myself, but we were wary in case our Plaid Cymru coalition partners wanted to re-direct the work we had started to implement.