Proposals to reform the school year | December 2023
ASCL Cymru's position: In response to the proposals to reform the school year, ASCL Cymru is clear that this is not the time to upend the school calendar with little to no evidence for doing so. This refers to either moving to a five-week summer break with a two-week half-term or moving to four-week summer breaks with two-week half-terms in the autumn and spring terms. This includes a proposal to decouple the spring (Easter) break with respect to both options.
ASCL Cymru is not against discussing changes to the distribution of term dates, but remains unconvinced as to the benefit for learners or the workforce. For leaders, a shortened summer break will curtail their ability to have a meaningful summer break. This very much feels like a political rather than an educational imperative. There are more important issues to deal with at the moment such as the dire funding of schools, poor attendance and behaviour, as well as a teacher recruitment crisis. None of these issues will be fixed by changing the school calendar.
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Target-Setting | November 2019
What is the context? In October 2019, the Welsh Government published
new statutory requirements and changes to school target-setting regulations for Summer 2019 cohorts and beyond. ASCL Cymru responded to the consultation on these changes and agreed that a focus on any single headline measure will inevitably undermine that measure.
However, the modified guidance, while improved in the long term, provides significant challenges and frustrations for members in the short term while still having the potential to be undermined by an improper local authority approach.
ASCL Cymru’s position:
ASCL Cymru is broadly supportive of the move away from targets set against specified measures.
ASCL Cymru believe that any target-setting requirements should fully acknowledge the implementation of curriculum change and that schools should not be penalised or unfairly held to account for innovative approaches to future planning.
Further, the way in which the adequacy of targets is interpreted by local authorities and other members of the middle tier is a potential cause for concern.
Why are we saying it? The Welsh Government has taken steps recently to make targets more individual to the needs of schools. This is welcome but needs to lead to performance data being used more intelligently by all members of the middle tier.
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Accountability | November 2019
What is the context? Welsh Government changes performance measures in order to incentivise behaviours in schools that they believe are desirable. But in all cases, as schools and their leaders are held to account largely by those measures (including through Estyn inspections and scrutiny by local authorities and consortia), other perverse incentives and behaviours emerge. The problem is that a focus on any single headline measure will inevitably undermine that measure, a phenomenon enshrined in Goodhart’s Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
ASCL’s Cymru’s vision document
Leading the Way: A Blueprint for a Self-Improving System (
Wales version) outlined this problem and called for a broad set of external measures, alongside locally determined metrics which the school or group of schools believe give additional information about the context in which the school is working. This position was reinforced during discussion at ASCL Cymru Council in October 2019.
ASCL Cymru’s position: ASCL Cymru does not believe that schools can be effectively judged by any single measure; a more rounded set of indicators would give a clearer and more helpful picture of a school.
Further, the way the current single headline measures are currently presented and interpreted by local authorities and other members of the middle tier is oversimplified and misleading.
Why are we saying it? The Welsh Government has taken steps recently to widen the range of indicators used to hold schools to account. This is welcome but needs to lead to performance data being used more intelligently. For example, the public presentation of categorisation information can be highly misleading and difficult for the public to grasp, leading to misinterpretation and incorrect conclusions.