School Improvement Partnership Programme Board meeting: 22 October 2024

The School Improvement Partnership Programme Board held its third meeting on 22 October. Following Owain Lloyd’s departure from Welsh Government, Georgina Haarhoff, Interim Director of Education, has assumed Senior Responsible Owner duties for the Programme and will now chair the Programme Board.

The meeting primarily focused on a consideration of the coherence and deliverability of the proposed approach for the national functions. A draft communications strategy was also presented for consideration by Board members.

Responding to the feedback from the report on the ‘Review of roles and responsibilities of education partners in Wales and delivery of school improvement arrangements’, Board members were advised that the national functions proposals recognise that it is not only the ways of working at partnership, local authority and school level that need to evolve but that the national role must also evolve to genuinely support our ambitions for a self-improving system. Government’s role in ensuring a shared understanding of priorities and issues and leading strategic discourse and solution creation is key to this and will guide the interface with the system and deliver improved targeted national support across all areas not just school improvement.

To support this approach, Welsh Government will initially take forward a small number of key developments to:

• establish a small and prioritised range of National Professional Learning delivered from a single national provider to ensure quality and consistency. This will reduce and streamline national professional learning and create a simplified and coherent Professional Learning landscape
• establish strategic national support programmes providing intense, targeted support designed to address our most critical system issues and support consistent implementation of our education reforms. The first such programme will be targeted at support for the curriculum
• establish a new “Education Improvement Team” within Welsh Government dedicated to enabling engagement and collaboration with local authorities. This team will lead regular dialogue with local areas to support the development of a culture of self-improvement and help connect national and local priorities for improvement. It will also help to ensure sharing of learning and good practice between local authorities and schools across Wales. This is a key development in our resetting of the way we interface with the system, focusing strategic conversations on our shared priorities

Board members confirmed that they were content for the approach to be shared with the National Coherence Group.

On 21 November, the Programme Board will consider local authority plans to deliver local school improvement arrangements. In early December, the National Coherence Group will meet to consider and subsequently advise the Cabinet Secretary for Education on whether the totality of change for the Welsh Government, Estyn, local authorities and other partners appears coherent and robust at a whole system level, and what the next steps are to deliver the overall system improvement.