It's an Education

BELL RINGS

Un munud. Tri, dau, un. Off we go.

Your school days. They are supposed to be the best days of your life.

Electron, good. Is it a slow-moving electron or a quick-moving electron?

'They certainly were for me.'

It's funny, isn't it?

It doesn't matter how many schools I go to,

and I visit a lot in my job, you come back to your own school

and you just feel like you're 11 years old again.

I'm Sian Griffiths, education editor of the Sunday Times.

And I'm visiting my old school in St Davids in Pembrokeshire.

-Hello!

-Hi!

Lovely to see you. Looking forward to seeing her.

This was my wonderful PE teacher,

who put up with me in the hockey team.

-Hello.

-Bore da. Croeso. Welcome to Ysgol Dewi Sant.

This school launched my career.

It gave me the grades to go to Oxford

and get two degrees in English. I was very happy here.

And that kind of set me on my career,

I guess, as a journalist and brought me to where I am today.

So it is really nice to be back. Oh!

-CROWD CHANT:

-Save our school! Save our school!

But more recently, Ysgol Dewi Sant has not had it so easy.

After being judged a poorly performing school,

it narrowly avoided closure.

The school was in crisis.

No leadership, anarchy in the staffroom.

We couldn't allow this period of uncertainty to go on any longer.

Good luck. Time starts now.

The whole school sort of felt the danger,

everybody definitely felt pressure.

I feel more angry for the kids that really missed out

and didn't have that opportunity.

Save our school! Save our school!

We were, I think, on reflection, a community

sleepwalking to oblivion.

What was going on in St Davids was part of a much bigger

problem across Wales.

For six years,

Welsh results in international tests revealed an alarming decline.

Schools in Wales are simply not delivering well enough

for students at all levels of ability.

This can only be described as a systemic failure.

It is my job to keep an eye on how schools are performing

right across the UK.

In recent years, I have really noticed that

schools in Wales are among the worst-performing in Britain.

And not just in Britain. Internationally, too,

they are lagging behind.

So I want to know why.

# It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas... #

Every Christmas, our family return to St Davids.

This year we are staying in a luxury hotel,

one of a chain opened by my brother, Keith.

We have all benefited from our schooldays here.

It's funny making this in St Davids, because we grew up here.

In fact, we lived in a council house not very far from this hotel.

There was a kind of mind-set in Wales, I felt,

at the time that you...

Education was kind of the way, not the way out but the way up.

Keith now lives in Hong Kong and runs one of the world's leading

architecture firms.

In order to get out of St Davids, you needed a good education.

Which was certainly provided for in the '70s here.

And maybe it's not quite as high-quality an education that is

provided for now because the rest of the world has moved ahead.

I don't think it's that St Davids or Wales has ceased to move

ahead or has regressed in any way whatsoever.

It's simply that the standards of the rest of the world are going

exponential.

Good morning.

'So when did education in Wales begin to change?'

And it is a very good morning in Wales.

Devolution in 1999 moved control of education from Westminster to Wales.

The National Assembly was free to create its own policies,

and this led to a major shake-up for our schools.

Wales and England were now adopting two very different approaches

to education.

Wales can run things, Wales can do things, it is

part of our maturing as a nation.

Good evening. The critics call them divisive and of no real value.

School league tables in Wales have been scrapped.

What they have not done is reflected the quality of education that

an individual school gives an individual pupil.

Testing of 11- and 14-year-olds is to be abolished in Welsh schools.

It will be an excellent opportunity for schools now to revert to

assessment for teaching and learning.

But getting rid of two measures which helped assess school

performance would prove costly.

International tests revealed that Wales was

falling behind the rest of the world.

The Pisa tests take place every three years.

15-year-olds in 68 countries were assessed

in maths, science and reading.

Asian countries consistently lead the way.

Scotland, England and Northern Ireland are in the top half.

But in the last results, Wales was bottom of the UK class.

It just puts Welsh kids at a massive disadvantage

and makes me feel that they are really being short-changed by

something that is going wrong in the education system in Wales.

Why did Wales slip so badly between 2006 and 2012?

What is your reading of what happened in the country?

It is very hard to assess, you know,

it has been perhaps a lack of attention to performance,

acceptance of mediocrity at the level of students,

at the level of classrooms, schools.

So that suggests that expectations of this system were not

as high as you might want them to be.

So we often hear that where children are in poor areas

and therefore we can't expect too much of them

in terms of academic success... Do you agree with that?

Poverty is certainly a challenge but poverty isn't destiny.

You can see, for example, that the

10% of the poorest children in Shanghai,

and they come from backgrounds where parents have no education,

where they work as construction workers,

as immigrants in the large cities,

those children outperform the 10% of the most privileged

children in Wales.

At the end of the day, these kids in Wales are going to be

competing on a global stage for jobs, for top university places,

with kids from across the world in a way that hasn't happened before.

Is that what it comes down to?

Is that why parents need to worry about these rankings?

Well, your education system today is your economy tomorrow.

We see that students working under high expectations typically

do a lot better.

Particularly students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

So it starts at the school level.

He said very clearly that culture is set at the top,

it comes down from the top.

So the Welsh government, it starts with the Welsh government

and then trickles down to the different layers,

down to the head teacher, down to the teachers, down to the parents.

But it starts with the politicians and their vision

and their aspirations for a system.

What happened with Wales in 2012, Wales has the worst-performing

schools in the UK.

Not only does it have the worst-performing schools in the UK,

it actually has some of the worst- performing schools across the OECD.

-Well...

-For lots of children in Wales, this is not working, is it?

OK, the Pisa results of 2012 were a wake-up call to the entire

system, that's the exact phrase my predecessor used

and he was quite right to use it.

But we have not been standing still since 2012.

We have instituted one of the most profound reform packages,

I think, any part of the UK has seen since the Second World War.

What we said is, and we were very honest about it,

that there was a taking of the eye off the ball,

if you like, in terms of, most particularly,

those aspects of accountability within the system.

When league tables were removed in Wales, there was

an issue, perhaps, about nothing taking their place in terms

of accountability so that we had a good picture of what was happening.

The OECD and the Pisa results called time on that

period of educational history in Wales

and things have changed profoundly since then.

So we have now a very transparent set of literacy

and numeracy tests for our young people,

as well as the categorisation system for our schools which we are

very proud of and we think is one of the most accurate

measures of how a school system is performing.

The educational landscape of Wales is changing.

And across the country, head teachers have the

responsibility to drive these new measures.

In St Davids, a new head was promoted to tackle

the problems they faced.

It comes back, doesn't it, at the end of the day it's a great head,

-great teachers who just keep wanting to get better?

-Yes.

Culture, ethos, high aspirations of staff,

high expectations of children. Yeah. It's not difficult.

Well, it is, but it's not complex in terms of what makes a school good.

Huw Lewis talks about that in-built dynamo of improvement.

He would like himself to make himself redundant, wouldn't he?

Would he?!

Course he would, in terms of being the Minister of Education,

he doesn't want to be a busy minister,

he would like all schools to have that

in-built dynamo of self-improvement where we have excellent

outcomes across the whole of Wales.

What happens in the four walls of a classroom is what counts.

For Hannah Daniels, the GCSE experience wasn't great.

She was on course to fail one key subject, maths.

The school was going downhill,

the maths department was probably one of the worst hit.

She ended up, I think, having five or six different teachers in one

year and she is an intelligent girl but she was failing dramatically.

Our new headmaster now, he completely turned it all around.

He actually employed an extra teacher

and he believed in all of us,

he thought that it was ridiculous that we weren't getting Cs.

And actually, I went from a U to a C in one term.

It's amazing the cultural changes that a headmaster can make

and the ability, you know, for teachers to feel...

empowered, energised, um... motivated...

All those things.

What type of ferns are they?

'Thank goodness that she had that experience.'

At least she knows she can do maths now.

Cool. OK, so that's text A then, OK? So, if you now...

In 2013, the Welsh Government introduced

numeracy and literacy assessments.

Every year, pupils aged five to 14

are scored for their maths and language skills.

Teachers now prepare students for these measures

as well as their exams.

There's more of an emphasis now on them being pushed

and every student within the school reaching their ability.

And what things are we analysing then and how?

We're looking at the writer's...

'It's a continual progress, really, from the top to the bottom.'

Technique, superb. The writer's technique.

How's he created that meaning?

'It comes from the top first, doesn't it?'

Then obviously the Welsh Government...

They're pushing a lot more than what they used to do,

and then the county is pushing us, pushing the head,

head teachers then, it's feeding down.

-..inspection, isn't it?

-Mm-hm, yeah. So, yeah.

We'll start off with the self-evaluation.

So, we've kind of started off with...

I think that full literacy...

'Today, St Davids is being ranked under another new initiative -

'categorisation.

'It's supposed to drive up standards

'and help parents see how well'

or badly their schools are performing.

Each school must provide information,

like pupil attendance and exam results.

They are then given a colour rating,

green at the top and red at the bottom,

which indicates the level of support the school needs.

Last year, only 30 secondary schools were awarded a green.

And a couple of years ago, St Davids was given a red.

That's where we are with literacy. It's really promising and I think it's cos we've come a long way,

and there's still some way to go as well.

I think...

OK, so I'm looking at this website called My Local School

and I'm trying to find out some information about my old school -

Ysgol Dewi Sant - and whether it's a school I'd want to send

my kids to if I lived locally.

But it hasn't got the kind of information I'd find

if I was looking...

for a school in England.

In England, I could pull up a school

and find out its position on a kind of league-table ranking,

how it compares against... all the other schools in England.

Is it first? Is it 25th? Is it 397th?

I can't seem to do that here.

What it does say

is that St Davids was last judged to be a yellow school.

But might the new assessment turn them green?

OK, so, I've just come out of a meeting of the assessment board.

And they had quite a young team in there

presenting a lot of evidence about what

they were doing to improve children's reading,

writing and maths skills.

And I think the assessor was quite impressed, but I think we're going

to have to go back later on to see if they actually have done enough.

So I hope they have.

There's one measure that many hail as the key to success in England

but which Wales continues to resist.

The introduction of academy schools.

And to see one of the best in action,

I've come to Mossbourne Community Academy

in the London borough of Hackney.

Strict code on school uniform, clear sanctions for rule-breaking

and daily line-ups in the school yard are part of what makes

Mossbourne one of the best-performing schools in England.

I was completely shocked when I first came here,

a little bit in awe and wondering what was going on.

But at the same time, I can see that it works.

If you have a uniform, enforce a uniform.

I don't like going to schools where the top button is undone,

the shirt's not tucked in.

You have a uniform policy, follow it. It's very simple.

The line-ups... Yeah, they work. It's a method.

It's not the only way,

but it's a method used in Mossbourne Academy that works.

An academy really is a private school in the state sector,

and the biggest thing about academies is

you have freedom over your budget

and you also get the delegated monies that would have gone to

the local authority into your budget to buy those services as you wish.

So, the budget for this school is approximately £11.5 million.

And you are the person who decides how that is spent?

I decide that with the strategic vision of my governing body,

but then I'm ultimately accountable for how that money is spent, yes.

And why is that better than having the local authority...

..in control of that money and passing some of it on to you?

Because I can decide, for example,

instead of somebody else deciding how

they think that money should be spent,

or a portion of that money should be spent, I can decide

if THIS particular school needs that money spent in that way.

-Mm-hm.

-So, for example, if I am able to save money on the way WE do HR

and finance, I can put that money more into the front line

and not having it sent off to the local authority.

And by the front line, I mean I can pay for better teachers.

-And you do, don't you? Tell me how that works.

-Yeah, so we have...

We call it the Mossbourne Allowance and we pay people on the main scale

£1,600 more than they would get in another school.

I think the fundamental thing is we are like a business,

we go out and deliberately seek trainees.

We deliberately go out to find the best people to train,

we train them with us, and then they have a career with us.

I aspire to maintain an inquiring mind,

a calm disposition and an attentive ear,

so that in this class and all classes,

I can fulfil my true potential.

OK.

Three, two, one.

OK. I want us to look...

..at this scene once more.

The kissing scene.

Mossbourne attracts the brightest graduates from the best universities

and helps train them on the job.

The school's first principal

is a firm believer in the academy system

and will be keeping a close eye on its expansion across England

over the coming years.

You're in favour of moving power from the town hall,

from the local council to the school, to the head teacher...

Well, yeah. Bureaucracies do not improve schools,

people sitting behind desks in the town hall do not improve schools.

It is people in the school

who improve schools, so why not give them

the necessary tools to deliver better outcomes for children?

And that's what the English system has done over the last few years,

and I think it is working and it's something, I think,

the Welsh system should try to replicate.

One of the things that England has done to try

-and improve standards is to turn schools into academies...

-Mm.

That's not something that you've done in Wales.

You very carefully, very deliberately,

have not gone down the academy route.

Why are you not prepared to consider that as an idea?

Well, the House of Commons Select Committee themselves

have said that there is no convincing evidence of academisation

as being something that drives school standards.

In other words, changing structures does not of itself raise standards in schools.

And I come back to my original point,

it's the level of professionalism of the teacher in the room

that is really the key driver.

The second point I'd make is that the highest-performing

school system in the UK doesn't happen to be in England and doesn't

feature academies at all, it happens to be in Scotland.

So, you can ask this question of the minister in England.

"Why have you chosen to go down the path of moving

"away from a community comprehensive model,

"when clearly the highest-attaining model of education in the UK

"is a community comprehensive model?"

What you're talking about, really, is administrative autonomy,

teachers...head teachers being free to be more powerful administrators.

-Yeah.

-What I want our head teachers to be are leaders in terms

-of the quality of teaching and learning in the classroom.

-Yes.

I want them to concentrate on that, not on school budgets,

necessarily, and not on the degree of independence

they might have in terms of paying for school transport.

In the Cynon Valley, a new super school has been built,

within the Welsh system.

Aberdare Community School merged three comprehensives,

two of which were performing poorly,

into a brand-new purpose-built school.

Head teacher Sue Davies is in charge of this £50 million site.

You know, I came in at flatpack version of the school, when we were

just a picture, you know, on a page, if you like, with the architects...

-Mm.

-And I insisted

on seeing everybody teach, and if they wanted to be

a part of our school, they had to be excellent classroom practitioners.

In England, they've got this system, you know,

-the academy system, where you get given a budget...

-Mm, mm.

..and they have powers to hire and fire staff,

-they have powers to lengthen the school day.

-Mm.

Would you like that kind of autonomy as a head?

I think, if I'm honest, within this authority, no, I wouldn't want that.

I feel we are supported by the authority, I think

it's dynamic, I think it has a vision, and I think...

You know, it has a vision with teeth, I suppose,

is the best description.

They stick to the vision. I like the system we've got.

I've been invited to take part in the new teaching scheme.

In one English class, they are studying Oliver Twist.

..start us off on the video, Mr Heath,

and we'll have a look at exactly where we go.

Oh, just pause there, Mr Heath.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is Miss Griffiths.

-Just missed us, Miss Griffiths, with our...

-I'm so sorry.

# All we ever get is gruel... #

It would have been perfect if you'd come in then, because you

could have marched your way in and popped

yourself down in your seat at the back.

I shall pop myself down in my seat at the back. Thank you.

And we've already...

Teach First Cymru is designed to draw the brightest graduates

into Welsh classrooms with six weeks' intensive training.

"Of this festive composition,

"the boys had one porringer and no more..."

"..with the view of catching up any stray splashes of gruel

"that might have been cast thereon."

Who do you like best, Pip or Oliver?

-Oliver.

-Yeah? Why do you like Oliver best?

-He can stand up for himself.

Cos he stands up for himself? Pip doesn't stand up for himself?

CHILDREN CHATTER

Three graduates from top universities have been

brought into the school.

Levi Baynham got a first in maths from Cardiff University.

Presumably, you don't feel at all worried that you could get A grades

for your students because you got A grades yourself

-so you know exactly...

-They love that. Students love that.

They want to know what you had in your GCSE.

"What did you have in A levels? What did you have at uni?"

They're like, "Wow. It's crazy. You couldn't have had that."

Yeah, I did.

And do you think that they think,

-"If miss can do that, I can do that"?

-Yeah.

"How is that possible?" I'm like, "It is."

I worked hard and they see that.

I think the fact that we've got high-flyers coming in

is really important -

you know, we've got an Oxbridge graduate with us now -

and I think they act as amazing role models

and they can talk to children

about the experience at Oxford or Cambridge

and they can talk to them about how to get there,

and I think that's powerful for our children.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate you dressing up for me this morning.

You can take your seat as normal.

What about this next bit? The green bit?

Well, that was really interesting, actually,

and it kind of made me realise that, actually,

teaching's a lot more difficult than I thought.

It's really hard. It's really hard to get kids engaged

in a half-hour lesson in a complicated and difficult piece

of literature that they have to understand.

It's kind of like, yeah, a lot of credit to teachers, really,

for doing that and teachers who do it well. I think it's a real gift.

One pupil, suspended in her old school,

has here been made head girl.

I came here, I was given a second chance here,

which I am really grateful for, because a lot of schools

wouldn't have accepted me

so, when I came here, it was just the opportunity I needed, really,

and I took it and then I'm head girl, so...

I was surrounded by people who wanted to achieve

and that was the best thing about it.

I was surrounded by people who wanted to get somewhere in life

and it's really made me think I want the same.

I sincerely believe that any child who comes through my gate

should have the opportunity to reach for the stars,

and that's one of our mantras.

It's about giving them that goal

and making them really value their own education.

But, over the border, there's still a perception

that Wales is slow to replace its teachers.

So I've got the question on the board.

Who'd like to come up and show us what we can do?

I'd love to go home and teach in Wales,

but the fact is the positions aren't coming up

because maybe you've got too many people

seeing out the ends of their career.

We know that cystic fibrosis is a recessive condition.

That's what really frustrates me,

because I think there are so many young people

who would love to go to work in their hometown,

would go to work in Wales, just like I would love to go and work

in Llanelli or Swansea and educate there, but I can't

because there's no jobs there

because people are seeing out their careers.

As part of our research, we talked to a young teacher

in one of the most successful schools in England.

He's a Welsh boy from Llanelli.

He'd love to come back to Wales and teach

but what he said to us was that there is a level,

a layer of teachers in Wales

who are just sitting in their jobs waiting for retirement.

Well, this isn't about getting rid of individuals.

It's about getting rid of negative attitudes

and I'm sorry that your...

The story that was related to you by that individual

does seem to be a very negative one

and I would encourage that person to maybe come back to Wales

and take a look at what's going on here,

because something very profound is happening,

something that has never happened before,

and it is about the remaking of the teaching profession.

A range of new measures, including teacher training and the curriculum,

are about driving standards up,

which should help Wales in the next round of Pisa assessments.

15-year-olds across the world have already taken the latest tests

and the results are due later this year

but, in Welsh schools,

there are still mixed feelings about the value of Pisa.

For me, if I'm perfectly honest,

it's about making sure that I prepare children as well as I can

for their English GCSEs, their maths GCSEs and all their subjects

and give them a learning pathway that is suitable to them

and gives them the best outcome.

Now, maybe that's naive but, if along the way Pisa results go up,

that's great.

Good.

So the charge is +2, the master's 4.

It's a view shared by St Davids' head of science.

Pisa testing is a waste of time.

It's on a test that is not prepared for

so we don't do any revision, any preparation for it.

We don't get the grades back. The students don't get the grades back.

They actually get pulled from lessons

where they are learning things that affect their future.

Something that quick, is something that quick going to be a particle?

-No.

-So it must be a...

-Wave.

-A wave.

I will happily take it seriously

if it's going to affect my students' futures.

But that's the point. It is going to affect your students' futures,

because your students are going to be competing against students

from Shanghai or Poland or South Korea for jobs

-in this global economy that we all live in.

-They will.

If you don't take this test seriously,

your students won't take it seriously.

"International rankings, who cares? They don't matter." But they do.

I didn't say international rankings don't matter.

I said the Pisa test doesn't matter. I'm not happy with the Pisa test.

If you want to have an international test, that's fine,

and my students are competing for jobs worldwide in the economy,

I agree, and they get that by doing the GCSEs, A levels, universities.

Our universities are some of the best in the world.

Our students go to them.

That's where they learn how to become a citizen of the world.

The Pisa test is on content that some people have studied,

some people haven't.

It's invariable that, if we haven't studied the content,

our students will not do as well.

-You're talking just in science.

-Just in science.

Give me the grades. If Pisa's so important,

how come I will not actually find out

how my individual students did?

As a parent, if I said to you,

"I'm going to prepare your child for the next two weeks for a test,

"they won't get the score back,

"you'll never find out how well they did,

"but, sorry, they won't be preparing for their maths exam

"while they're doing this," how would you feel?

For me, the Pisa tests really do matter.

Governments and businesses from all over the world take them seriously.

But, today in St Davids, there's another important judgment,

the results of their latest categorisation assessment.

Hey! How did it go, David?

Well, it's been a busy day and thanks for coming here

on the day that we've been on our categorisation

and challenge and support meeting.

Yes, we have had lots of the leadership team coming in,

giving presentations on where we believe we are

in terms of progress against our self-evaluation report

and our school development plan and what we're hoping to become,

and I'm delighted that we've been categorised as a yellow school.

-But you were a yellow school before.

-We were a yellow school last year.

We were a red school the year before.

The feedback was positive today from Aero? You're still progressing?

-Absolutely.

-You've improved since last year?

It's a really strong partnership with Aero.

They are our colleagues.

They offer another set of eyes on how things are progressing

within the school.

We were in total agreement

and we believe that working closely over the next year

with ten days' additional support

will help us improve standards further.

Does another yellow constitute progress?

I'm not sure if the new categorisation system

makes this totally clear

or whether parents will be able to understand exactly what it means.

I don't know if you remember, this time last year,

I turned to St David and said,

"Come on out, St David, help us out."

Well, I think he's answered our prayers.

As another year draws to a close,

there's no doubt about the school's renewed optimism,

but, for others, wider concerns remain.

I'm not an expert on the performance of Welsh schools

but what we mustn't see in the UK is a growing divergence in performance

between the constituent parts of the UK.

I'm of the view that the English education is moving ahead quickly

for the reasons we've just been through.

It's really now up to the Welsh government

to look at its own performance

and ensure that it matches the performance in England.

So all eyes are now on the next Pisa results due out in December.

Can Wales make significant improvement?

It's certainly possible. Is it likely?

You know, that depends really whether the kind of policies

and initiatives that Wales put in place are successfully implemented.

There have been a lot of good ideas put on the table.

I think the test of truth is whether those things

are actually put effectively into practice.

It seems to me a lot rests

on whether Wales does improve its Pisa score.

So, if the schools don't come up to this 500-point score in December,

you won't be stepping down? You'll stay in your job?

I'd be very disappointed. I'll be very disappointed

but I'm absolutely confident that we will see an uplift

in terms of Wales's Pisa scores

and all the other measures, as well,

that show that a system has momentum, has forward momentum,

and the evidence is undeniable that that has been happening

over the last few years here in Wales.

A few weeks after this interview,

Huw Lewis announced he will not be standing for re-election

as an Assembly Member.

A new person will succeed him as Education Minister

and they will face the same challenge -

to make a Welsh education system

that can compete with the rest of the world.

Thank you, students. Have a brilliant holiday.

You deserve it.

You're allowed a couple of days off, Christmas Day, Boxing Day.

Don't forget you've got exams when you come back, all right,

so make sure you revise.

OK.

APPLAUSE

Is it really enough in today's age

when this generation of kids is going to face a world

that is more ferociously competitive when it comes to getting a job

than probably any other in history?

Don't we want our schools to be academically excellent,

places where our kids can really achieve the best that they can do?

Children do only get one chance at an education

and we, all of us, have a responsibility to make that

the best that it possibly can be.