Due to Andy's unfortunate illness, the university have been putting on 'guest lecturers' for us to cover our "What is education" module. Personally I think this is a very good idea as it gives us a chance to hear from people working within different aspect of education in Wales, many of whom may be able to give us more of an incite than Andy would because of the nature of their jobs. This way we also get to see how the policies and practices we are learning about are put to work in the 'real world' and who's jobs they affect.
9th January 2012- We had our first guest lecturer today. Although the content he was speaking about could have been seen as dull had it been presented differently, I feel he really pulled us into the topic. He also included general background knowledge of Wales, which is always useful. Apparently 50% of people living in Wales, either live in the south or south/east, and because of this, there are many rural schools in the north, central and south/west Wales. According to the guest lecturer's statistics only 20% of Primary schools and 15% of Secondary schools use Welsh as a main language. He went on to say that there is also a shortage of Welsh-medium headteachers with the NPQH. I believe this shows that sadly the Welsh language is slowly dying out, specifically in the south. Personally I think this is something that desperately needs to be addressed.
Through evidence that Welsh education as a whole can improve, it has been proposed that the 22 local Welsh authorities should change into 4 consortia.
After finding out a few years a go that Welsh children were not performing as well academically compared to children of the same age all over the world, there was large focus on the education system in the country. In the 2006 PISA report (A report produced by the OECD every 4 years which makes child across the world sit the same test) showed that Wales did make a progress, but it was uneven and needed to be further advanced. However, when looking at these results, it is important to take into account that Wales does not publish league tables, unlike many other countries, so the schools chosen to do the PISA tests in other countries may well be towards the top of their league tables and therefore not necessarily on a par with the Welsh schools chosen. Despite this, the Welsh education systems aim to improve the curriculum and teaching, leadership, working with others, networks of professional practice, intervention, support, improvement and accountability.
16th January 2012- Today's lecture was taken by an employee of Estyn, Russell Grigg. Estyn inspects quality and standards in education and training providers in Wales and provide advice to the Welsh Assembly Government on the quality and standards of educational environment. Mr Grigg made a point to of informing us that quality and standard are not the same thing. Standard is seen as the level you reach whereas quality is your experience, both very different things. Their main goal is to spread and promote good educational practice inside Wales. According to Estyn, the three main things to consider when inspecting are accountability, ways to improve and to inform. Most of Estyn's employees are ex-teachers, who write reports on individual institutions and Wales as a whole. When inspecting there are three things to consider:
1) How good are the outcomes?
2) How good is provision?
3) How good are leadership and management?
Through these three main assessments, the inspector can produce a good conclusion about the school or educational institute. Like OFSTED, Estyn use a ranking system to assess different aspects of a school. For example attendance would be classed as 'excellent,' 'good, 'adequate' or 'unsatisfactory.' It was interesting to see their use of adequate, Russell told us that the word was not very liked, yet, still, Estyn chose to use it, as it encourages the educational institute to do better.
