The Institute of Welsh Affairs doesn't seem to have given this any publicity, but has recently put up a series of videos of a debate held in London a couple of weeks ago.
It was chaired by Peter Riddell and featured contributions by David Melding, Leighton Andrews and Adam Price. Use the £20 you've saved to buy your own bottle of wine, then sit back and enjoy.
As yesterday's reshuffle showed only too clearly, Labour has precious few AMs of any real calibre. However I have to admit that Leighton Andrews is probably one of them.
So it's a real shame that he won't get to be re-elected as AM for the Rhondda in 2016, now that Leanne Wood has announced that she is going to stand for election in that constituency.
I'd therefore urge him to put himself forward as one of the candidates on Labour's list for the South Wales Central region, as it is likely to be his best hope of returning to the Assembly. The new Welsh Government will need an effective opposition, and his experience will make him an ideal shadow minister.
I was amused by this short paragraph in today's Western Mail:
Last year’s poor showing for Wales in the Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) tables on literacy and numeracy led to Education Minister Leighton Andrews calling for major improvements in school standards.
We have to admire that brave Mr Andrews, calling for major improvements in school standards when nobody else in Wales was at all concerned about what the PISA results had shown.
Meanwhile back in the real world, rather than a distorted mirror image of it, pretty much everyone in Wales was concerned about our poor showing in the PISA tables ... and in fact, most of them were calling for Leighton Andrews to do something about it.
Yes, I know that's completely unreasonable. Why should it have anything to do with the Minister for Education? When under pressure, start pointing the finger of blame at everyone but yourself. Anybody would think there was an election on.
Ask nine out of ten people, and they'll tell you that things like the health service and education are completely devolved to Wales. But that isn't really true. There are many aspects of the twenty devolved areas that are not devolved, and the pay and conditions of employment for teachers is one of them.
Yet when Nerys Evans said that setting our teachers' pay and terms of employment should be a matter for us in Wales, it provoked a rather strange response from Leighton Andrews, who described it as a "shocking admission".
The first thing to say is that it's hardly an admission. In case he or anyone else hasn't realized it yet, Plaid Cymru want to see decisions that effect only Wales being made in Wales ... and following the referendum, we know that about two thirds of voters in Wales agree with us on that.
But the shock is not so much what Plaid want, but what Leighton Andrews said in reply to the suggestion by Rex Phillips of the NASUWT that it would result in lower pay for teachers in Wales:
Mr Andrews said the implications were incredibly serious and put Plaid at odds with the teaching profession.
"The First Minister and I have ruled out the devolution of pay and conditions for this very reason, we do not want to see an exodus of Wales' best teachers to England," he added.
There'll only be an exodus of the best teachers to England if we decide to pay our teachers less or give them otherwise inferior terms of employment. Leighton Andrews is clearly saying that if things were left to him to decide (at least as one of the parties at the negotiating table) he would pay Welsh teachers less than their English counterparts. But why? The amount of money available to pay teachers in Wales comes partly from Council Tax, but mostly from the Welsh government's block grant. Wales will get the same money (based on the amount given towards education and all other departmental spending in England) irrespective of how the Welsh government chooses to share it out in Wales. Teachers will only get less if the Welsh government decides there are more important things it wants to spend the money on instead.
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Now I fully accept that the same argument doesn't apply where public sector workers are paid directly by the UK government. Tax collectors, passport office workers (what few might be left) and the like should be paid the same, for if such workers were paid less in Wales, it would mean less money coming into Wales. Yet this is what is beginning to happen, and not just because the Tories and LibDems are now in power in Westminster. Back in 2008, it was a Labour government that introduced regional pay for those working in the Courts Service, with staff in Wales taking the hit, as we can read here:
Ludicrous' regional pay attacked - BBC, 13 July 2008
To his credit, Dai Havard spoke out against it, warning that it would be the thin end of the wedge ... but his intervention made a fat lot of difference. His own government did it anyway and, as we can read in these two reports, the Tories and LibDems are now set to finish the job:
Calls for regional pay in public sector - BBC, 16 June 2010
Civil servants face regional pay threat - Financial Times, 5 July 2010
Leighton Andrews has got it completely the wrong way round. The way things are going, all public sector employees in Wales are likely to be paid less for doing the same job than their counterparts in the richer parts of England. So devolving teachers' pay and conditions to Wales is in fact the best way of making sure that we pay our teachers what we think they deserve.
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If anybody is concerned about what might happen with teachers, all we need do is look at what's happened in the past with other professions. Here are two examples of what devolved responsibility for setting pay and conditions has actually meant in practice:
• In March 2007, the nurses pay review body recommended a 2.5% pay increase. As we can read here, the Scottish government decided to implement it in full, and the Welsh government then did the same. But the Westminster government decided that nurses in England would not get the rise until November.
• Then in December of the same year, as we can read here, the Police Arbitration Tribunal recommended that all police in the UK should have a 2.5% pay rise, backdated to 1 September. The UK government decided to ignore that recommendation and only backdate it to 1 December, but the Scottish government went along with the recommendation. Thus, for the first time, police officers in Scotland got a different pay settlement from the rest of the UK.
So why is Labour scaremongering? If we elect the right government, devolving this responsibility will be a way of protecting teachers' pay and conditions, not something to be afraid of. We don't have to reinvent the wheel either, for if we look at what happens in Scotland, we will see that teachers' pay and conditions are negotiated through the SNCT, a tripartite body comprising members from teaching organisations, local authorities and the Scottish government. We can set up something similar for Wales.
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After the referendum Carwyn Jones said that Wales "has now come of age". Coming of age means that we can and should take this responsibility. Yet it seems as if Labour would much prefer to shirk it, perhaps because they want to be able to play the victim card when the UK government introduces regional pay for all public servants; or perhaps because the Labour party would, if left to their own devices, make the same decision ... but want to point the finger of blame at anyone other than themselves.
Vote accordingly.
It was good to see today's announcement by Leighton Andrews that £4m is to be spent on early years' teacher (and teaching assistant) bilingual training in Wales ... not least after having written this post about the low percentage of teachers who have bilingual skills only two days ago.
Extra £4m for early years' teachers Welsh training
The money is welcome, but we need to bear in mind that this is only a continuation of the existing level of funding, not additional money. The original funding stream of £6m ran for three years from 2008, and this merely continues the funding at the same level (in fact less, if we take inflation into account) for another two years.
In broad terms the money will continue to go into two areas: Cam wrth Gam trains about 180 people a year for an NVQ Level 3 qualification, these are new entrants. Geiriau Bach aims at improving the bilingual skills of those already working in early years education.
When the Foundation Phase was introduced, one of the major challenges was to provide enough staff to make it work as intended, because the pupil to teacher/assistant ratio needs to be much lower. So most of this money would be needed anyway in order to train more staff. But the majority of our teachers (we train about a thousand primary school teachers a year, not counting assistants, and about half of these will find work at the Foundation Stage) are still not being trained to work bilingually. This isn't just a problem for Welsh-medium education but is also a problem for English-medium education, because Welsh is just as much a part of the curriculum as English or maths or science. What would be our reaction if only 20% of our teachers were up to standard in numeracy? Would we accept it because they were up to standard with English and science? Of course not. We would ensure that every teacher that qualified had the numeracy skills necessary to teach our children maths.
So why are we still treating Welsh differently? We should not be training teachers—particularly in early years teaching, where the teacher is responsible for all subjects—unless they have a good level of all-round ability when they qualify.
Of course what will happen is that the teachers and assistants being trained to work bilingually will be snapped up by the ever-growing Welsh-medium sector, because that's where they will be most needed. But that probably means that teaching Welsh in English-medium schools will hardly be touched by this initiative, and it is here that teaching standards are at their worse.
The choice between either Welsh-medium or English-medium education is up to parents; but even though parents might want their children educated in English, that certainly doesn't mean that they don't want their children to learn to speak Welsh. Since the eighties, there has been a consensus across the political spectrum that Welsh should be a core subject in the curriculum, and this reflects the fact that 81% of people in Wales think it is important that children learn to speak Welsh, with only 7% disagreeing [Source, para 4.7].
Now I fully accept that it takes time to change things. But to me, the problem is that we are still not only funding, but providing the bulk of our funding, to train new teachers and teaching assistants whose Welsh is not up to standard. The previous funding period (2008-11) has demonstrated that the service provided by Cam wrth Gam and Geiriau Bach works. If it didn't, we wouldn't be continuing the funding stream for another two years. So what is now needed is not a continuation of the same, but to expand it so that a greater percentage of those we train are competent to teach Welsh. That will not involve extra money, it will simply require a reduction in the numbers attending courses that have no bilingual element, and a corresponding expansion in the numbers attending courses that do. For the colleges and other training providers concerned it will mean either making the courses they run bilingual, or closing their courses so that teachers and teaching assistant can be trained elsewhere.
Since Leighton Andrews took over the education portfolio he has certainly talked an outspoken, even provocative, talk. But in making today's announcement he is not doing anything new, he's just walking the same walk as his predecessor.
It was either great timing or an even greater stroke of luck that Leighton Andrews' should announce the consultation on revising the statutory procedures for schools reorganization at the same time as news broke that Ysgol Capel Iwan would have to remain open for up to a year, even though it has no pupils.
It's all to easy to put two and two together and conclude that we must speed things up in order to prevent future fiascos of this sort. But I think we'd be shooting at the wrong target.
The situation at Capel Iwan is a fiasco, but it is not too serious a fiasco. It's easy to throw a figure like £110,000 into the air, but the reality is that the staff concerned are not going to be paid to do nothing; they will be given notice or deployed elsewhere. And even if the school had been formally shut down, the building would still be there; empty, needing security, and as likely or unlikely to find a new use as it is now. Yes, it is an embarrassment to Sir Gâr, who had not addressed the problem of a school where the numbers had halved from around 30 in 2006/7 and 2007/8 to 16 in 2008/9 and 13 in 2009/10. But the irony is that if the Council had made a proposal to close the school, it might well have galvanized the local community into a protest campaign and action to save it. That might have encouraged new parents to send their children there, and that might have kept it going for longer. Perhaps lack of publicity allowed this school to die a "natural death".
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School closures of this type are inevitable. By any objective measure the number of surplus spaces in schools has to be addressed, and this means that some schools will have to close. In a good number of cases, given the demographic trends, the situation is so black-and-white that it is tempting to think that the statutory procedures can be made more simple. But we must be very wary of using these black-and-white cases as a justification for curtailing all statutory procedures. The tail must not be allowed to wag the dog.
The consultation document that Leighton Andrews has produced is very simple. It merely proposes that the statutory objection and response periods be halved, and that they must not be made in school holidays.
In my opinion this is far too simplistic a "solution" to a rather more complicated problem.
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The main principle at stake is that people must have adequate time to consider and respond to reorganization proposals. It seems obvious to me that reducing the objection period from two months to one month is, in some cases, not going to allow enough time for this to happen properly. Firstly the documentation is not always available at the start of the period, and secondly it still doesn't give enough time for the local community to set up meetings to discuss the proposals.
We need to be aware that there might be two very different scenarios under which changes are proposed. In all cases the local authority will have already put proposals out for preliminary consultation, in many cases with a number of different options in a genuine desire to engage with the community to find a way forward. In such cases I believe that the statutory process could be refined, because the resulting formal proposal will hardly be news to the community concerned. However, there is another scenario in which a local authority could come up with a markedly different proposal, perhaps because of the unacceptability of a first proposal that did not properly consider the range of options. So although cutting the statutory period might well be reasonable in the first case, it would not be reasonable in the second.
The better solution must surely be for the statutory period to be cut only when there has been sufficient previous consultation on a number of options beforehand, and where the chosen proposal is substantially similar to one of the options. This will mean giving the earlier consultation some statutory status. Publishing it with this status would be necessary to prevent a very cursory proposal being passed off as a proper consultation.
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When it comes to a local authority's response time, I would have no objection to this being cut from a month to two weeks. In most instances it is a foregone conclusion that there will be at least one objection to any proposal, and only one objection is all that is currently necessary before the decision is referred to the Welsh Government. So the local authority becomes not much more than a "sorting office". There's no issue of principle at stake, just paperwork.
But Leighton Andrews' proposal misses the wider point. The bigger problem that needs to be addressed is that it only takes one objection for the matter to be referred to the Welsh Government. To my mind, this is a ridiculously low threshold that we urgently need to revise. I realize that there is a political "power play" in operation here. This proposal has come from the WG, and the changes it proposes will simply put more pressure on local authorities without imposing any commensurate improvement in response at a national level. Leighton Andrews has also made no secret of the fact that he wants to take education out of the hands of the 22 local authorities and put it into the hands of a smaller number of regional education authorities instead. In this "power play" it is hardly surprising that his proposal makes no attempt to change the unequal balance of power between local and national government. It is also worth pointing out that if such regional education authorities are formed, they would need to have a corresponding degree of democratic accountability. Local authorities have the great virtue of being directly elected.
I believe that we should set higher thresholds for the number of objections necessary before a decision is passed to national government. I think we also need to make a distinction between objections from local people and organizations, and those of others from outside. I wouldn't want to be dogmatic about the figure, but it has struck me as odd that some proposals attract many thousands of objections when the numbers who would be affected by the proposal can only be in the hundreds. I'd suggest that it should take a minimum of 25% of those in the catchment areas (i.e. the immediate catchment area and the surrounding catchments which children would move into or from) and for the number of such objections to be greater than the number of endorsements, before the matter can be referred to national government. Of course that wouldn't stop others from outside the area making objections or endorsements, or having them considered in the same way as local objections.
But I have a degree of misapprehension about even that. For in principle I think that these decisions should be made locally rather than nationally. Perhaps a good analogy would be with the planning process: that the decision would normally be made locally, but that the minister concerned would be able to "call in" certain proposals in certain defined circumstances. I think that the role of national government should be to set targets and lay down procedures to be followed ... and in addition to this they will also exercise a large degree of influence by means of funding. These tools should be quite sufficient in themselves without passing the power to make almost every decision to a minister in the WG.
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There is one other aspect in which the current decision-making process is fundamentally flawed. In some cases the decision will either be to do what is proposed, or not to do it. But in other cases there will be a number of different options, each of which will have its pros and cons, but with not much to choose between them.
What happens at present is that a local authority will, if it conducts a preliminary consultation, have put a number of options forward for consideration. But it will then only be able to put forward one statutory proposal ... though hopefully the one chosen will reflect local opinion better than the others. If the proposal is referred to the Welsh Government (no matter whether we establish a new threshold or not, or whether the proposal is "called in" under the alternative arrangement) the minister is currently only able to rule on that one proposal. S/he must either accept or reject it, and if s/he rejects it everything has to start over from square one, even though it might be obvious that a solution needs to be found urgently.
I would like to see a situation in which the local authority presents a range of options in the first consultation. The LA would then choose its favoured proposal for the second consultation, but could include alternatives. If the threshold for objections was not reached, the LA would proceed with its favoured proposal. But if it was reached, the minister would then have the option of either approving it, or rejecting it in favour of one of the alternative proposals, or rejecting all of the proposals. If Leighton Andrews really is concerned about speeding up the current statutory processes, this flexibility would do much more to achieve that aim than merely cutting out a few weeks, but not changing the current arrangements in any other way.
To put it in blunter terms, there is often more than one way to skin a cat.
What is wrong with the current system is not the time it takes, but that it lacks any degree of flexibility. What is the point of saving six weeks, but then losing a whole year or more by having to go back to square one? Also, as almost all reorganization proposals can only be implemented at the start of the school year, how can saving six weeks make any real difference anyway? Leighton Andrews is just tinkering at the edges rather than dealing with the real problem. I would therefore urge people to reject his proposal as it stands, and to press for a more ambitious overhaul of the system that would result in:
• the formal recognition of preliminary consultations
• a higher threshold before the decision is referred to the Welsh Government, or a "calling in" system
• the inclusion of alternatives which the minister could approve if s/he rejected the main proposal
We have until 5 November to respond. Details of how to do so are here.
Much of what will appear on this blog will also appear in the Syniadau Forums, but the emphasis on this blog is slightly different. The forums are focused more on the structures and institutions that Wales will need to develop in order to become a successful independent nation, arranged on a subject by subject basis, but the blog will have more of an emphasis on day to day political news and developments.
People are welcome to reply or leave comments either here or on the Syniadau Forums. If anyone wants to initiate a new subject they are very welcome to do so there.
