40 Facts About Leighton Andrews

Leighton Andrews was born on 11 August 1957 and is an academic and former Welsh Labour politician.

Leighton Andrews was the National Assembly for Wales member for Rhondda from 2003 until 2016.

Leighton Andrews left the Labour Party in 2019, attacking the party's failure to deal with anti-semitism and its attitude to Brexit under Jeremy Corbyn, but sought to rejoin in 2020, having voted Labour at the 2019 UK General Election.

Leighton Andrews holds a BA Honours from the University of Wales, Bangor and an MA in History from the University of Sussex.

Leighton Andrews was a sabbatical officer in the students union at Bangor in 1978.

Leighton Andrews has been a visiting professor at the University of Westminster from 1997 to 2002; and has been an Honorary Professor at Cardiff University since 2004.

Leighton Andrews was appointed as Professor of Practice in Public Service Leadership and Innovation, Cardiff Business School, in August 2016.

Leighton Andrews is married to Ann Beynon, formerly BT Director Wales; the couple have two children.

Leighton Andrews has written three books, Wales Says Yes, Ministering to Education and Facebook, the Media and Democracy.

Leighton Andrews was an active Liberal Party member in the 1970s and 1980s.

Leighton Andrews was elected as a Union of Liberal Students member of the National Union of Students executive in 1979 and stood as the Liberal Alliance candidate for Gillingham in the 1987 General Election at the age of 29.

Leighton Andrews was co-founder of the Yes for Wales campaign for the 1997 Welsh devolution referendum.

Leighton Andrews joined the Labour Party following the successful referendum campaign for a Welsh Assembly.

Leighton Andrews is the author of Wales Says Yes, a history of that campaign.

In 2002 Leighton Andrews was selected to fight Rhondda for Labour, after the party's shock defeat to Plaid Cymru's Geraint Davies at the 1999 Assembly election.

Leighton Andrews retook the seat, with the highest increase in Labour's vote of any constituency in Wales and its highest constituency vote.

Leighton Andrews was appointed to the Welsh Assembly Government on 31 May 2007, as a Deputy Minister for Social Justice and Public Service Delivery, with special responsibility for housing.

Leighton Andrews became Minister for Education and Skills in the Welsh Government after the 2011 election campaign when Labour won the right to govern alone, with additional responsibility for the Welsh Language.

Leighton Andrews was forced to resign as Minister in June 2013, when Carwyn Jones told him he had broken the Ministerial Code by campaigning against the closure of Pentre Primary School in his Rhondda constituency.

Leighton Andrews introduced a series of reforms as Education Minister, in schools, in higher education, and student finance.

Leighton Andrews set out his schools agenda in a speech in February 2011 which was intended as a response to Wales's poor showing in the 2009 PISA results.

Leighton Andrews was a strong proponent of the longstanding policy to merge universities in Wales to establish larger, more stable institutions.

Leighton Andrews's campaign opened with a blunt speech to vice-chancellors, whereby he accused them of ignoring the Welsh Assembly Government, and announcing a review into the governance and sustainability of the HE sector.

Leighton Andrews's policy led to the merger of Swansea Met and Trinity St David's, along with the University of Wales, to create one university out of four predecessor institutions, with the option of merging further with local FE colleges to produce a new post-16 educational model.

The University of Glamorgan merged with the University of Newport to form the University of South Wales, but Leighton Andrews gave up on his original plan to merge the two with Cardiff Metropolitan University, formerly UWIC.

In September 2012, Leighton Andrews ordered the remarking of several thousand GCSE English papers in Wales that had been affected by a very late change in the marking scheme.

Leighton Andrews's move was greeted with great relief and enthusiasm by teachers and candidates.

However, it drew strong criticism from Michael Gove, who accused Leighton Andrews of being 'irresponsible and mistaken'.

Leighton Andrews subsequently announced that Wales would have an independent exam regulator, Qualifications Wales.

Leighton Andrews inherited from his predecessor, Lesley Griffiths, a Gender-based violence Bill, and took early steps to rename it to the name under which it was eventually passed into law in 2015.

Leighton Andrews actively campaigned to keep the Pentre Primary School in his Rhondda constituency open, arguing that Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council had failed to carry out an appropriate community impact assessment.

Leighton Andrews lost his Assembly seat at the 2016 National Assembly for Wales election when he was defeated by Leanne Wood, the leader of Plaid Cymru.

Leighton Andrews described his campaign defeat in a post for Labour Uncut.

Leighton Andrews subsequently made it clear that he would not re-stand for the seat at the next Assembly election in 2021.

In May 2019, Leighton Andrews wrote a blog post explaining he had left the Labour Party, amid concerns over leader Jeremy Corbyn's Brexit policy, and his handling of the anti-Semitism crisis in the party, and would be voting for the Green Party of England and Wales in the 2019 European Parliament election in the United Kingdom.

Leighton Andrews subsequently sought to rejoin the Labour Party to vote for Keir Starmer in the 2020 leadership election.

Leighton Andrews was the first politician in Wales to be ITV Wales Politician of the Year on two occasions, in 2011 and 2012, in recognition of his agenda-setting work as Education Minister.

Leighton Andrews voted 'Yes' in the first referendum on devolution in 1979, his first ever vote.

Leighton Andrews was one of the founders of the Yes campaign in 1997.

Leighton Andrews supported primary law-making powers for the National Assembly for Wales, provided they were approved by the people of Wales in a referendum.