Katie Hopkins clueless on Welsh education

KATIE Hopkins is very clearly expressing her unqualified personal opinions on the streets of Wales. No other profession, which teaching is in Wales, has to contend with “Tom, Dicks, Marys” playing at being authorities on education. She is clearly lamentably ignorant of pedagogy.

Her claims about the Welsh education system being inferior is prejudice. She appears too ignorant to understand that the OECD Pisa rankings are based upon estimated average scores and that OECD recognises that social deprivation is the greatest determinant of children’s attainment throughout the world.

She does not appear to be very good at maths. A degree of common sense should not be needed to understand that it is virtually impossible to make comparisons on averages of children from a population of 53 million in England and three million in Wales. If England was divided in Pisa populations similar to Wales, then there would be deprived regions of England achieving similar Pisa scores to Wales.

Katie Hopkins also appears ignorant of the fact that Pasi Sahlberg, a leading Finnish educationalist, refers to Pisa being a virus. Professor Dylan Wiliam, who is a recognised world authority on education, has criticised it and others. Katie Hopkins does not appear to respect the fact that children’s education is too important to be based on political rhetoric, hope, optimism and guesswork. Howard Gunn Tonteg, Pontypridd