Welsh teenagers 2 years of education behind English teenagers

[Ablondiebutagoody]

Latest Pisa research has Welsh kids up to 40 points below English kids, which corresponds to two full years of education.

AIBU to say this is due to a dumbing down of the curriculum by Welsh Labour and that Phillipson is eyeing up the same for England?

YANBU: It's down to Government meddling
YABU: Other factors are responsible for Welsh kids poor performance

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.

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.

Welcome to the new Welsh curriculum.

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.

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

So as far as you know, curriculums get changed without any effort to assess/benchmark the changes? That's nuts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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

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

Oh here we go.

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?

Welsh Labour are not in power in Wales.

Learning the language of your community is certainly not a hobby. I agree the ratings are low and need to be addressed but in Wales there is a big emphasis on play based learning rather than phonics etc in reception which is often seen as a positive. Ds school in rural wales just got 4 into oxbridge and this is a state school. I think that there is a much broader picture that needs to be looked at alongside these results such as rurality, social mobility and poverty. These are not an excuse but certainly need dealing with. You would hope Plaid will see this and do something.

YABU because your choices are so inflammatory! Is this because of stupid Labour or not basically. I'm v interested to know what the reasons for the difference are but I'm not an educator or a researcher with any evidence about all the factors so it's difficult to say. I would be confident to say it's worth finding out if curriculum changes are a factor and that's about it.

Doesn't Wales have a huge amount of child poverty? I would have thought that is likely to affect education rates.

Curriculum needs "dumbing down" anyway doesn't it? I thought the Gove reforms were almost universally considered to have been a disaster.

My controversial view is that devolution has overall not been a success for Wales, at least from a policy pov. (I understand it's not just about policy outcomes and is an emotive topic. I support language promotion and think devolution in Scotland has worked so I'm not coming from a pro-Westminster stance).

But both education and healthcare are in needlessly poor states right now. Healthcare in North Wales is straight up abysmal. The government is not doing a good job and I would argue that's because the pool of leaders is too small and blinkered.

Of course teaching minority languages is a negative, if it's using school teaching time to the detriment of other subjects. I thought we might have moved on from attempting to limit young people's life chances.

And it's hardly their 'native language ' if they need it teaching to them in school. I would have thought native speakers would be chattering away like budgies from babyhood if it really were their native language, and using school time to improve their maths and English, or horror of horrors, maybe learning a modern foreign language so they could widen their horizons a little?

Oh yes you're right - they were beaten recently weren't they, forgot about that. However the Labour party are the ones who have left the legacy of shit schools / schooling, in Wales. Still we need Labour out of power in England, they are destructive.

Eta. And healthcare. You'd think England would watch and learn.

Universally accepted perhaps except in the universe, where standards rose significantly in the PISA tests

It sounds like it’s not a Gaelic Medium school, and if not then Gaelic is most likely being taught as one of the two modern languages that Scottish schoolchildren are introduced to in primary school. There’s always one or two alternatives to a Gaelic Medium school in any catchment, so this definitely doesn’t ring true.

English is taught in English schools so why would welsh in wales be any different? You are doing the same learning the vocabulary, reading welsh language books and poetry. I find this argument re welsh language education is often from those who have no idea how it works. Does learning another language alongside English from an early age mean all children that do this will have low educational attainment, I think not.