ITV: Has Wales' approach to school testing and curriculum flexibility backfired?

[ParentOfOne]

ITV has a 23-minute video on the education system in Wales

In summary, Wales' decision to scrap standardised tests (so that children are never tested externally before their GCSEs) and to give lots of freedom to each school, instead of providing a more rigidly and uniformly structured curriculum, does not seem to have paid off, as Wales has the worst school results of the whole of the UK, and their scores keep getting worse.

Opinions, of course, vary.
I am not a fan of teaching to the test and I see how many schools resort to dirty tricks to boost their scores (eg "incentivising" certain pupils to leave, coming up with partially selective admission criteria to select more academic children, etc.).

But no tests at all risks creating chaos and a complete lack of accountability.
All I can say is I'm glad my kids do not go to school in Wales.

I am a parent in Wales and I’d be really interested in the opinion of Welsh teachers. From my perspective, and I can only speak from limited experience- I think there’s a poverty of aspiration among teachers, it seems to be hard-wired into the leadership and teaching staff at my children’s school that as long as a child is making SOME progress, it doesn’t really matter if that progress is painfully slow and means your child is years behind. Our school won’t tell you if your child is behind or struggling and there’s not a lot to support children with dyslexia for example. My children go to a Welsh medium school and I do not think the language has anything to do with the results, apart from the fact there is little to none ALN /SEN support in Welsh eg it’s almost impossible to diagnose anything in Welsh because there are very few Ed Psychs who can do that. It’s very disappointing, but sadly not a surprise to me that we’ve scored so badly.

@user1496076579 Our school won’t tell you if your child is behind or struggling

What???????

Sadly true. This is just my experience in one particular school but there seems to be great pains taken to avoid involving parents in their children’s education.