Guest Lecturer #1

On the 9th of January our "What is Education" Lecture was taken by guest lecturer Ken Jones who is the Dean of Humanities. In this lecture he discussed how since 2000 the number of pupils in local authority schools has been decreasing, that there is a potential shortage of Welsh-medium headteachers with an NPQH, that there were previously 8 local authorities and now following re-organisation in 1999 there are now 22 authorities. We also discussed the possibility of this being change into 4 consortia.

We were also told about PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) which is an international study to evaluate education systems worldwide by testing the skills and knowledge of 15 year old's. The OECD (Organisaton for Economic Co-operation and Development)compare the PISA results from different countries, as all children across all countries involved sit the same test comparison is easy. The lecture went on to compare the PISA results from 2006 and 2009 in Wales.
The results showed that in the three year gap Reading had dropped by 5 points, Maths had dropped by 12, and Science had dropped by 9. Within the home nations table Wales was lowest and below the OECD average.

This lecture was enjoyable as it was interesting to see how Wales had not improved within three years, but rather dropped in points. It was also interesting to consider the possible pitfalls in having so many local authorities.