: Leighton Andrews
: Ministering to Education A Reformer Reports
: Parthian Books
: 9781910409435
: 1
: CHF 5.30
:
: Allgemeines, Lexika
: English
: 416
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: ePUB
'Important and highly readable....of interest around the world because it enables the reader to see education reform from a minister's perspective as very few books have done before.' - Sir Michael Barber Ministering to Education is the first book by a former Welsh Government Minister since the creation of the National Assembly in 1999. As Education Minister in the Welsh Government from 2009-2013, Leighton Andrews was twice named Welsh Politician of the Year. This is his enlightening, frank and readable account of the education reforms initiated in the early years of Carwyn Jones's period as First Minister, and the complex challenges that still lie ahead to make the Welsh education system as good as any in the world. Offering the inside story on the reform journey Wales embarked upon, Andrews controversially reveals how he deliberately brought the media into the debate on school ranking. He debates the decision to regrade exam results when English Language GCSE exams came under fire in 2012, and the effect such decisions have had in setting the education systems of England and Wales on diverging paths. Student tuition fees were another area where Andrews led Wales in a different direction from England. Following Michael Gove's departure as Westminster Education Secretary, Andrews questions whether Wales or England has fared better and suggests what should happen next.

Leighton Andrews has been the assembly member for the Rhondda since 2003. A former head of public affairs at the BBC in London, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Westminster and an honorary professor at Cardiff University. He was Carwyn Jones campaign manager in the Welsh Labour leadership election in 2009, and convened the steering group for the Yes campaign in the 2011 referendum. Sir Michael Barber is the chief education advisor for Pearson publishing company. He is a former partner and head of the global education practice at McKinsey& Company consulting firm, advisor to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and a global expert on education reform and implementation of large-scale system change.

Introduction

Education, as the Welsh cultural critic Raymond Williams reminded us inCulture& Society,is one of those words which gained its modern meaning during the Industrial Revolution. If I were writing a book on educational philosophy in Wales, I would draw on the writings of Raymond Williams and the even earlier pioneers of adult education, the founders of the Plebs’ League, the Central Labour Colleges, which gave Aneurin Bevan one of his first routes to publication, and the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). Amongst their observations and disputes many of the great questions about educational practice were addressed in ways which are still relevant today. Their debates around adult education were communitarian in focus, unsurprisingly, given how many of their leaders, such as Noah Ablett and W.H. Mainwaring, were drawn from the Unofficial Reform Committee in the Rhondda which gave birth, just over a century ago, toThe Miners’ Next Step.The community socialist traditions of the South Wales valleys sit uncomfortably with the often libertarian individualism of much of educational philosophy, even today, and would find some of it self-indulgent and lacking in rigour.

This is not, however, a book on educational philosophy. Nor is it intended to be an academic book. But I hope that it will be useful to academics as well as practitioners. I hope it will be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about the shaping of education policy in Wales. I hope that the book will also provide insights into the operation and culture of devolved policy-making and public administration in Wales, as well as the interaction between a devolved government and a UK government at a time of significant policy divergence.

I believe that I am the first former minister in any of the Welsh governments since 1999 to write a book-length account of any of their periods as a minister. I hope others will follow. We need more reflection on devolved politics – on what has gone well and on what has gone wrong – away from the self-important rhetoric of the Assembly Chamber and the glib simplicities of a TV studio. I began work on this book a few weeks after I left the Welsh Government on 25th June 2013. I had always intended to write an account of my time as Education Minister in Wales at some stage in the future. I just didn’t expect the opportunity to come so soon!

Inevitably, much has had to be left out. I have focused on the main areas of reform – schools, further and higher education, qualifications, the Welsh language – as well as key responsibilities in my own portfolio where there were specific policy differences with London. Even here, I have had to edit ruthlessly. I have sketched in outline matters where there is more to do, such as the curriculum.

Like any former minister, I am restricted by the Ministerial Code, and have therefore principally relied on published sources. Anyone hoping for juicy titbits from Cabinet meetings will be disappointed. However, the period of the book covers some interesting moments in the development of devolution in Wales.

The story begins during the One Wales Coalition government of Labour and Plaid Cymru. Carwyn Jones’s leadership victory in December 2009 had enabled us to refresh the image of Welsh Labour eighteen months before the Assembly election. Our ambition in 2009 was to build on the leadership election victory and deliver a full victory in the Assembly elections of 2011. Positioning Carwyn as a Leader for the whole of Wales was key to this, of course, but his own decision to make education a key plank of his leadership election manifesto gave us new energy in the 2011 Assembly election in which education policy featured strongly, and in which we won an additional four seats, taking us from twenty six to thirty out of the sixty seats in the National Assembly.

Our election preparations began in 2010, alongside the referendum campaign which delivered full law-making powers for the National Assembly in March 2011. Our key 2011 campaign theme –Standing up for Wales– was firmly in our minds by the summer of 2010. In December 2010 at Carwyn’s request I attended a meeting of Ed Miliband’s Shadow Cabinet where electoral strategy for 2011 – English local elections, Welsh and Scottish elections – was being discussed. I was amused to find that the same theme –Standing up for Communities– had been developed in England