Andrews Ministering to Education

A Reformer Reports
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-910409-43-5
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten

'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.

Leighton Andrews has been the assembly member for the Rhondda since 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. Sir Michael Barber is the chief education advisor for Pearson publishing company. He is a former partner and head of the global education practice at McKinsey & Company consulting firm, advisor to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and a global expert on education reform and implementation of large-scale system change.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Andrews, Leighton

Leseproben

Introduction

Education, as the Welsh cultural critic Raymond Williams reminded us in Culture & 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, to The 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, the Western Mail editorial 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....