Issue - meetings

Cabinet Member – Councillor Beca Brown

To consider a report on the above.

To accept the report and note the observations.

Councillor Beca Brown (Cabinet Member for Education) and Gwern ap Rhisiart (Head of Education) were welcomed to the meeting. ⁠

Submitted – the report of the Cabinet Member for Education inviting the committee’s input on the proposed changes to the way that the school improvement service would be delivered in the future.

The Cabinet Member set out the context. She thanked GwE staff for all their work and support over the years, noting that their input and expert advice had been greatly appreciated by the schools.

The Head of Education expanded on the content of the report and members were then given an opportunity to ask questions and offer observations. ⁠ 

It was noted that the Welsh Government's draft guidance 'Collaborative model between schools, LAs and national government' noted that governing bodies should 'Consider their own arrangements for working with other governing bodies to support collective responsibility and collaborative improvement', and a member asked whether there was an intention to re-establish the Gwynedd Governing Body, which was in operation before Covid. In response, it was noted:

·         That they did intend to restore the Forum for governors, in hybrid form, while also looking at opportunities to make the body more collective.

·         That a Children and Young People's Forum was currently being established and that it was also natural to address school governance, to have everyone's voice in moving these aspects forward.

Concern was expressed that extending the collaboration between schools could mean that the lessons provided jointly would become increasingly English, given that two secondary schools in the county mostly operated as English schools. It was questioned whether the Council had guidance for joint-working to ensure that there was no slippage in the Welsh-medium provision. In response, it was explained that the new model did not suggest moving children from one school to another to get lessons, instead it referred to school leaders working and supporting each other.

It was suggested that the proposed arrangements seemed to be extremely challenging.  It was noted that there were all sorts of individual problems in every school and that it was important to have similar schools helping each other, instead of acting based on geographical clusters. It was also noted that headteachers were already overwhelmed, and that the expectation of taking on an additional role of helping other schools (although already doing so unofficially) would place a lot of extra pressure on them, especially in small schools. In response, it was noted that:-

·         Putting all of this into practice in Gwynedd schools would be very challenging for a number of reasons, including the fact that Gwynedd had so many school units, and many of those school units were small schools, and a very small number of non-contact headteachers.

·         The challenges highlighted what GwE had managed to do over the years, which was to go into the schools and tailor the leadership to individual schools, regardless of size.

·         They repeatedly emphasised in the discussions with the Welsh Government that our context in  ...  view the full minutes text for item 8