Welsh teenagers 2 years of education behind English teenagers

Is it universal across England? All that I have read in recent years suggests that London children especially from lower income families do better than elsewhere.

Are we framing the issue incorrectly- is it a London v rest of Great Britain difference?

Oh here we go.

And surely it's the parents responsibility anyway. Why is it schools responsibility to teach the children their 'home' language? Bizarre. Lazy parenting.

Welsh Labour. Sooner Labour are out of power anywhere in the UK the better.

This doesn't ring true for me, learning the Irish language is a huge part of the Irish primary and secondary school curriculums but it has not impacted their scores l:

Students in Ireland are significantly above the EU and OECD averages in all three core domains, with performance in reading amongst the highest across OECD and EU countries.

I find it interesting that the posters would think Welsh and Scottish children learning to speak their native language is a negative, have we not moved on from this ...

I know nothing about how curriculums get changed. I don't work in education, either as a practising educator or in policy or research.

I'm just saying that evidence that Welsh pupils do worse in a set of tests than English pupils doesn't tell us anything about the effectiveness of Welsh government education policies. It might be that other factors (which may or may not be fixable by the Welsh government) are holding back educational attainment in Wales.

Or, as another poster hints above, it may be that the results themselves are far from a perfect representation of educational outcomes.

Don't know about Welsh, but some Scottish parents near us moved because they said the school only seemed to focus on Gaelic, not teaching them all the things they're learning at our local primary. No idea if this is true/fully true, don't know them very well.

The headline you’ve seen are about the international PISA tests. They’re a specific style of test about interpretation of data and multi step problems. It’s not a test that directly compares reading or maths skill. Yes wales should be performing better at it. If they want higher PISA scores they need to spend more time teaching kids how to answer PISA style questions. Whether this is the best use of teachers time remains to be seen.

Using part of the school week to teach Welsh can't be helping. Children should be being educated to be part of a wider world, not just a small corner of the British isles where the Welsh language is far from universal anyway.

It should be taught as a hobby outside of school hours if anyone wants to learn it. Rather like Morris dancing.

Stating the bleeding obvious. It's not Phillipson's department any longer. Lucy Powell is Secretary of State for Education.

Hard to make a binary choice on this. Welsh government actions may be a factor, but they're far from the only factor.

I haven't seen any meaningful efforts to make statistically valid comparisons between Welsh pupils and those in other parts of the UK, controlling for factors like pupils' socio-economic situations and parental education, and without that we're just waving our particular prejudices around.

Welcome to the new Welsh curriculum.

More factors at play like deindustrialisation and poverty for example hence why the North East fares so badly too and pockets of the North West and Yorkshire, particularly SY.

I'm really worried about what the Welsh government has done, and is planning on doing, to the education that kids receive. They are hugely dumbing down science and English subjects and making it very hard for kids from Wales to compete for UK university places. I'm keeping an eye on what happens but currently looking to move to England before mine are in secondary education.