Meeting of the Parliament 12 December 2023
I thank the member for the tone that she has adopted in relation to our working together on the issue. There is now a need for us to work across parties on some of the challenges, and she has my commitment that I will continue to work with her and Liam Kerr to that end.
More broadly, the member talked about curriculum improvement. One of the things that I was keen to say in my statement, given the wide range of data sets that are being published today, is that this is not the whole picture. My statement is part of our response, but we will work with our teaching profession to help to drive the improvements that we need, particularly in maths education.
Indeed, I am very keen to work with our maths teachers, and I want to appoint a subject specialist who has the necessary skills and qualifications to give me advice on where improvement needs to be made and how that can be driven forward. I am not a maths specialist—I do not pretend to have those qualifications—but it is important that we recognise the qualifications of those, particularly in our secondary schools, who deliver our subjects. Their investment in their subject and their knowledge will help put us on the right trajectory in relation to PISA.
PISA is part of the story, but as it is survey data, we will need to be careful about making direct comparisons. That is why the ACEL data has been helpful today, because, as I touched on in my response to Liam Kerr, it is predicated on teacher judgment.
I am conscious of time—and, indeed, that I have not had time to respond fully to Ms Duncan-Glancy’s ask on additional support needs—but she is right that there is a challenge here. I intimated in my response to Liam Kerr the Government support that we provide, but we will need to look at that again.
Part of that work comes through the national action plan that we have with local government. We are working through a number of those actions. To my mind, local authorities are not yet fully supported in the way that I would like them to be supported, but we will continue to work with local authorities and protect that budget line, too, as it is vital to ensuring that we have consistency at local authority level.
The member has my word that this is not the end of the story with regard to our response to PISA or to the other challenges that we have touched on today.