Welsh teenagers 2 years of education behind English teenagers

That is fine at @Periperi2025 - but my friends who used tutors still had to supervise plenty of homework anyway and practise X times a week and mark it. So you can do 5 sessions a term but if you want her to progress then it will be homework anyway and often it will be going through that type of book (at least in England).

I'd love to take that approach but my DD is a little darling when other people teach her things and a pain in the arse and entirely resistant to me teaching her!! Home schooling her would be pure anarchy!!
I always thingk we should do kid swaps to teach our kids key skills or sports because they always seem to respond much better to someone elses parents!!

I speak a few languages, some of them minority (my family immigrated to the UK). It's never held me back at university or in my career. In fact, research shows bilingual children outperform their monolingual peers on many tasks.

And Bond for English comprehension used to be good too. If you have a motivated child, you can just set them some homework yourself.

I'm surprised that some are suggesting kids learning Welsh is a reason Welsh kids are behind? Surely the universal consensus is that languages and music help learned from a young age helps the brain to develop? Where my dd lives, Welsh is the first language. Its spoken on the streets, in the shops and is mandatory in some public facing roles. I'm trying to learn it, and I have to admit it's tricky!
In many respects Wales do an amazing job of looking after their young people. They have no prescription charges, a higher minimum maintenance loan for students, I think £10k, which enables students to focus better on their studies. What it hasn't been able to do is replace the industry gap that was left when mining etc was ripped out of the valleys, leaving pockets of deprivation, which is directly linked to educational attainment.

You could also just purchase the Collins and CGP 11 plus book series in Maths and English. CGP is very good and explains it all quite well.

Just found a maths tutor who covers KS2 through to A level who lives down the road from me and has really good reviews, so have messaged exH with a link, and will take it from there. I'm think maybe a block of 5 weekly sessions each term just to push DDs maths on.

I'm also concerned about this, and I've just opened a Khan maths account. I did Kumon as a child but it's not cheap, so if this helps (it's free) I'll be pleased.

This is shocking that it is clearly ingrained in education, was this just at primary school level or throughout? If it's just primary I figure I can ride it out with some extra input at home.

My cousin is a year 4 teacher in England, she advised me to start DD on Oxford reading tree when she was little and we were starting to become concerned at the total lack of inertia, I may need to message her regarding next steps and particularly maths.

Do maths tutors for primary school age exists? We live near a uni with a teacher training department so I wonder if I could find a student who wants to earn some extra money.

But something is fundamentally wrong that they are holding kids back because they are ahead of other kids

We had this. They informed me that my DC was in the gifted and talented bracket after tests, and when I said ‘oh fantastic, what will this mean for his schooling, how will we nurture it?’ they said ‘oh no we won’t be making any changes, we were just telling you as we thought you’d be pleased. But you can’t expect us to differentiate between the children, it wouldn’t be fair to the other children if he’s got work they can’t do.’

I was gobsmacked but this is pretty typical of the Welsh system from what I gather.

Also there are no SATs in wales. Which in some ways is nice, but means that poor schools find it incredibly easy to hide.

They (Michael gove I think) changed the teaching methods for Reading in England and that greatly improved results.
For some reason Scotland and possibly Wales are not adopting it.

My DDs school is incredibly middle classed. I feel like an under achiever as a Band 6 in the NHS and 2 undergrad degrees. There are a significant number of PHDs amongst the parents, and it's a wonderful happy school environment... BUT... read my previous post about reading issues with DD.

It's definetly not simply a social deprivation issue.

Maybe they are just a bit thicker?

DD8 (y4), last term she stopped getting sent home with English books to read, after a bit I asked DD what was going on and she said that she had "run out of books at level 9 and they didn't know what to do with her because she was already a level above the next best reader and several levels above the rest of her year" (small school 8 kids in year). I messaged school, not sure if DD had got this quite right. The reply I got was

"I have read with and moved her to stage 11 in English. I have discussed with her that it is possible to read without fully understanding what we have read. She appears to understand stage 11 however if she struggles please let me know."

At parents evening we have been repeatedly told she is an excellent reader, doing great etc etc.

But level 11 is what English kids are expected to be achieving by end of year 2, not end of year 3. DD is bilingual, but her reading level in Welsh is a far bit lower. So she's doing okay, but not "excellent" by any standard.

Her school is a really great little primary school, the staff are wonderful and DD LOVES going to school, and they get them outside loads and give them wonderful experiences and support. The staff are incredibly dedicated, so I feel the problem lies in their training and the entire ethos and curriculum, not with the individual staff.

But something is fundamentally wrong that they are holding kids back because they are ahead of other kids or because they might not fully understand every word (surely that is how vocabularly is built). She's been slowly reading Harry Potter and the philosiphers stone over the summer (she is very familiar with the story from being read to and the film), which is way above level 11.

Maths is another challenge, because she chooses what difficulty level she tackles herself and won't push herself through fear of getting it wrong. Child led is nice, but not always.

It should have been, though - but the language was systematically discriminated against in a deliberate decision to try to eradicate it, meaning that Welsh children of earlier generations were denied the right to learn and speak their own language and therefore could not do the same for their children.

Some people do have a bad attitude to the Welsh language but not people who deliberately choose to send their children to Welsh medium secondary schools and it seems from the statistics that these children aren’t achieving as expected. I am most definitely all for promoting the Welsh language but I think we need to take an unflinching look at all factors which may be influencing the achievement levels and identify what the education system can modify and what is a result of wider social issues. It’s too simple to blame a Labour administration and say that this will spread to Westminster as OP suggested.

This is only my lived experience but I would say that in South Wales, the middle classes go down the Welsh school route. So that would explain the social advantage.
As for the bad GSCES I think it's because the teaching staff in Welsh medium secondaries are chosen for their language ability not their teaching ability. Plus they're struggling to recruit Welsh language teachers so they're not as picky when appointing. Again this is just my opinion based on our small town 🙂

@WestwardHo1 perhaps the 'generations of low aspiration ' are because they are so poorly educated?

There are complex reasons why I would have thought, and certainly can't all be explained with "Labour are shit" and "Welsh is useless". South Wales in particularly has some dirt poor former industrial towns where there have been generations of low aspiration. Also you can't just say "England" as a homogenised entity - there are massive areas of England in the same boat as Wales economically and socially, and presumably educationally.

There's the immigration factor too - I imagine certain immigrant communities in England pull the whole country up, given that parents of these children are focussed on and dedicated to educational achievement, and these communities are way smaller in Wales.

I really dislike the tone of some posters with reference to the Welsh language. It's not the nineteenth century any more. Do they still moan that they are being excluded when they go in a pub or shop and hear Welsh?

The statistics are showing that children doing their GCSEs through the medium of Welsh are achieving less well than those doing them in the English language, even though they tend to be more socially advantaged. I think we need to research why. I do want Welsh to be taught but I think we need to dig into the factors in the poorer results in Wales .
suspect there are several factors and it’s more complicated than the OP suggests.

There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of this just people on the thread saying what they think

Bit of both I think.
My DDs are 11 & 15 and couldn’t really complain about their education so far so I guess we’re lucky, but I do worry about my youngest going through all of secondary on the new curriculum.
There is a lot of poverty and social issues in Wales too compared to England as a whole so that has to be a factor.
Fewer private schools in Wales too so more children in England will have a private school advantage.
Would be interesting to compare Wales with more deprived areas of England.

In my area of Wales, the Welsh language is very widely spoken so it doesn’t feel like it’s “learning Welsh” taking time from other subjects, most of the kids speak at least some Welsh anyway when they start school. Learning to read in Welsh first has been a positive for my DC, it really helps with English reading.

To add, I don't actually think the Welsh language is to blame for poor results. I'm a non Welsh speaking Welsh person. I don't think Welsh should be dropped although I'd like to see it taken off as a compulsory GCSE subject. In my experience having taught in England and Wales is that having Welsh from day 1 at school made their confidence with other languages at secondary better.

I do think you have a point about recruitment of teachers. High level of fluency in Welsh is prioritised in some areas over everything else. There needs to be balance

Maybe, though I doubt that the claims on here that all Welsh kids will end up doing a single GCSE will turn out to be true.

It's a bit premature to blame the current results on something that hasn't actually been introduced yet.