What action plan does the Minister have to reduce the attainment gap for children from a poorer background?
Tackling the impact of poverty on educational attainment is at the heart of our national mission in education and I set out our plans in March and June 2022. Building on this I published a roadmap for High Standards and Aspirations for All on 21 March 2023 to set out a whole-system approach to tackling the impacts of poverty on educational attainment. I provided further detail on the progress of actions to tackle the impact of poverty on educational attainment to the Senedd when I gave my Oral Statement on 28 March 2023.
The Pupil Development Grant (PDG) has a key part to play in tackling the impact of poverty on attainment. Funding of around £129m has been allocated to PDG in 2023-24 and we continue to work closely with PDG regional representatives to identify the areas where funding can have most impact.
The Curriculum for Wales is inclusive of all learners, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds. It focuses action on supporting learners to make progress in a given area or discipline, as well as how they should deepen and broaden their knowledge and understanding, skills and capacities, attributes and dispositions. This is key to all learners embodying the four purposes and to progressing into different pathways beyond school. We are providing purposeful support to schools, including funding to create time and space for practitioners to engage with their peers, undertake school cluster working, access professional learning and apply the increasing bank of practical resources on curriculum design and progression on Hwb.
PISA results suggest that we have a better equity balance than many other parts of the OECD and Wales’ learners were found to be more academically resilient than the OECD average. The results also show that socio-economic disadvantage had less impact on their scores than on average across the OECD. Education in Wales was found to be more equitable than the OECD average, and that in other UK countries, as the attainment gap between more disadvantaged learners and less disadvantaged learners is smaller.
The statistical release on patterns in Reading and Numeracy published in November does not contain data regarding an attainment gap relating to different backgrounds. The release is the first of a series of anonymised releases planned on national-level personalised assessment data. A more comprehensive release on the 2018/19 to 2022/23 data, to be published in late spring 2024, will show demographic differences, for example between male and female learners and the gap between learners eligible for free school meals and their peers. Future annual releases will show information on learners' development over time. The releases will eventually form part of a wider range of national-level information on learner achievement covering the breadth of Curriculum for Wales.
Having a common understanding of national trends in Wales is an important foundation to inform our policies and actions to boost learners’ achievement in literacy and numeracy, which are key to children’s development across the curriculum. Being able to observe how national-level attainment in reading and numeracy is playing out and potentially changing over time will help us to reflect on how our policies and actions are working.