This week’s TES is reporting that the chief inspector of Estyn (the Welsh equivalent of Ofsted) Ann Keane has just published a report claiming that 40% of pupils starting secondary school in Wales do so with a reading age of six months below their chronological age. What I would like to know is how she… Continue reading Welsh education – ‘producerism’s last hurrah’!
I know I’m a week late on this but it’s taken me a week to be able to compose a temperate response to the news that Leighton Andrews, the Labour education minister for Wales, has suddenly decided that the pupils of Wales ‘deserve better’ and that what is needed now is to raise standards. After… Continue reading But it’s too late, Leighton now, it’s too late…
Returning to my previous posting, a poll commissioned by the Newsnight programme was shocking in a number of ways. According to Newsnight, despite current spending reaching £86 billion a year – a 72% increase since 1977 -, two thirds of people ‘don’t think the government has invested our money on education in the most effective… Continue reading Read my lips, LibLabCon: it’s the basics wot count!
The government’s latest edict is beginning to make it sound like a Private Eye parody of itself. Its latest decree is to ‘guarantee’ children a legal right to a good education. According to last week’s Telegraph, John Dunford, of the Association of School and College Leaders, ‘warned that the proposed laws risked creating one of… Continue reading Government guarantees – the new “cones hot-line”!