Ken Jones guest lecturer 9/1/12

Ken Jones is the dean of humanities of Swansea metroplotian univeristy. He came in do give us a lecture on a brief history of recent education change in Wales. He started of his lecture by asking if anyone knew who the current minister for Wales is? embarrassingly no one knew who it was. Ken told us that his name was Leighton Andrews and he replaced Jane Davidson.He went to talk about that there used to be 8 local authorities but since 1999 there are now 22 local authorities in Wales. He felt that this was far to many local authorities as Wales is not a big nation and we have similar amount of local authorities here as they do in England. Ken Jones felt that this was also a problem with education where pre 1999 you only had 8 education directors (one for each authority), 8 deputies and so on. You now have 22 of each position which he questioned the need for so many and I agree with this. Ken then talked about 2006 PISA (programme for international students assesment) testing which he said some of us would of done when we were in school, I could not remember doing any I could be mistaken mind!! He explained what the pisa testing was and it is basically set by the OECD (Organisation for economic co-operation and development) accross 70 countires it is a standard assesment in reading, maths and science and OECD are then able to compare each country against each other to see which country is doing well and who not so well and can rank them accordinally. Wales did not score very highly in the assesment and their response was to up school effectivenes framework (SEF). the SEF is wales's key policy for education reform and it's main aim is to improve better learning outcomes and wellbeing for all children. The Welsh assembley also created professional learning communities which is designed to enhance pupil learning. It is about teachers learning together observing other teachers at work and talking about methods and ideas together and ways to improve themselves. Despite these changes though in the 2010 PISA scores dropped dramatically Wales were ranked 38th for reading, 40th for maths and 30th for science, below average score on each and was the lowest we have ever been and as a result we haved seen ourselves cast adrift from Engalnd, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

I found what Ken Jones had to say very intersting because I did not believe that Wales would be so far behind in each result because of the amount of money that is put into education standards and after the 2006 results the policies put in place to improve clearly have not worked.