Wales must raise game and not let pupils down
Schools need more ‘attention and respect’ as Wales recovers from the worst of the pandemic, says Laura Anne Jones MS, Welsh Conservative Shadow Education Minister. Here she lays out her thoughts on the way forward
FROM the war in Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis to Labour’s record-long NHS waiting-lists and the upcoming council elections, education has been forgotten about of late.
And it shouldn’t be.
The youngest in our society lost out on a significant part of their lives to protect older generations during the pandemic. As we move to more stable times with regard to coronavirus, we owe them our attention and respect.
We cannot discuss recovery in our health service and our economy without taking a look at our schools too. Welsh children missed out on more school days than any other British nation – 66 days – and studies indicated that Covid set back a decade of progress on educational inequality in the UK.
Wales’ school inspectorate concluded that learners’ maths, reading, and social skills have all suffered as a result of closures. They also found the “divide between pupils from disadvantaged and more privileged backgrounds became more pronounced over the course of the pandemic”.
However, not all the issues experienced in schools can be blamed on the pandemic, with long-standing issues such as underfunding from the Labour government playing a part in leading to Wales receiving the lowest PISA scores – that ranks education systems across the world – of all UK nations every year since 2006.
Wales spends less per pupil on education than both England and Scotland, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, with English students benefiting by £100 extra per person compared to their Welsh counterparts.
Indeed, a NAHT Cymru report last year highlighted the impact of chronic underfunding on Wales’ schools, with teachers stating they’d been forced to cut expenditure to balance budgets in the face of Labour cuts, with implication of additional learning needs children as well.
Given the scale of the challenge, what has Jeremy Miles been up to since he took over as Education Minister?
He kept facemasks in classrooms despite government scientists saying they did little good for younger pupils but did harm their learning; was forced to U-turn on spending £3m to roll out toxic disinfection machines into schools instead of improving ventilation; and refused to release a report on educational leadership in Wales six months on from its completion.
This is not to mention deliberately failing to universally distribute to schools an educational book on The Queen and the monarchy just to snub the Conservative government, or how a survey funded by the Labour government asked secondary school pupils about when they first had sex.
Never mind this collection of blunders, nothing has been done to arrest the decline in teacher numbers – some 4,000 fewer than in 2011 – and, according to teacher-training statistics, will only get worse as targets are missed year on year.
And while Labour and Plaid Cymru may boast about what they have achieved on free school meals, it is wrong for them to make them universal for all primary pupils, allowing the children of millionaires to benefit from a scheme the core purpose of which is to provide for the least fortunate.
As important as it is to highlight Labour’s numerous failings, where do we go from here?
The Welsh Government’s investigation on changing the school day provides an opportunity to see if and how pupils could benefit from a new system, but that may come too late for all those who need to catch up from what has been lost over two years, as is the case for older learners, who will not feel any advantages from the Tertiary Education Bill. They cannot just be written off.
So ministers could do worse than to look at what the Conservative government has already said it intends to do in England: half a million teachertraining opportunities and higher starting salaries, funding for senior mental leads in each school, targeting tuition for every pupil who needs it, and working with local authorities to raise standards across the board.
And then there is my own crusade to address the decline in pupils taking modern foreign language courses. GCSE entries for French and German have declined by 41% and 45%, respectively, since 2015. By contrast, in England there were noticeable increases in French from 2019 to 2020, while Spanish entries have almost doubled since 2005.
To future-proof education, ensure our children have international opportunities, and so the next generation gain valuable skills for the workplace, ensuring MFLs is a subject that’s central to schooling must be a priority. And this should be something that can be done fairly quickly through a framework that allows schools to become centres of excellence that specialise in MFLs to start.
Labour have a responsibility to not let any children down. The education and mental health of so many young people have suffered and we need to do everything we can to ensure that the government in Cardiff Bay gives them all the tools and support they need to have the same opportunities as everyone else in the UK.