27/11/2013 The Wales Report

Tonight on the Wales Report: Testing times for Welsh education - with the

results of international league tables soon to be announced will

Wales make the grade? What can be done to tackle poverty

in rural communities across Wales? We have a special report.

And what will the vote on independence in Scotland mean for

devolution here in Wales? Stay with us for the Wales Report.

Good evening and welcome to the Wales Report - the programme that

examines the issues that affect lives in Wales and questions the

decision makers. Education in Wales is currently at a critical juncture.

Five of Wales 22 local education authorities are in special measures,

and yesterday AM's clashed over the future of education provision in

Wales. Next week, Wales faces the next test, as the international

league tables for 15-year-olds known as PISA will be published. In the

last round, three years ago, Wales was ranked lowest of the UK

countries in the tests that compare literacy, maths and science. The

poor performance led to wide-ranging changes to education here but last

week Education Minister Huw Lewis warned that parents should not

expect to see a great improvement. Here's our Education Correspondent

Arwyn Jones. We live in and disconnected --

interconnect world. Education is a commodity for governments, a badge

of honour as well as a tool to attract businesses and the Welsh

government is no different. At the heart of it all, P. In Wales we have

always been rather proud of our education system. This idea of a

self educated working class who saw books out of poverty has always been

a large part of our national consciousness but we have come a

long way from those days of chalk and back boards and next week we

find out how Wales has fared in the so-called PISA rankings. When the

last results came out, it was a wake-up call.

These results are disappointing. They show an unacceptable fall in

our overall performance. Everyone involved in the education sector in

Wales should be alarmed. There can be no alibis and no excuses.

As a consequence, we have seen a raft of changes to the education

system. There have been changes to the way the information we get from

our schools is measured. Children as young as seven now sit and examine

every year. Schools are placed into bands and teachers follow a few

framework in the classroom, or following on from those results

three years ago. There might be another answer...

Taking the government 's lead, some schools like this one in Carmarthen

now include PISA style questions in their lessons. Not just to improve

our standing in the league tables but they say to improve education

overall. Having results compared with

students all over the world, it is not the easiest thing to hear when

you are being tested but at the same time, I think that is quite good

because it is not just trying to beat the other countries. It is

trying to work out who's educational system is working better than

others. In the PISA questions, you have so many sources of information,

they have to bring their everyday experiences into answering these

questions. What we feel these people have been doing over the last two

years is progressing as far as using their own strategies.

On one hand it is never again because I feel like I am being

judged but then it is like a beast because I'm really competitive. --

like a boost. Despite these changes and the

expectations of these pupils, education Minister Huw Lewis has

already started preparing us for disappointment when the latest

results emerge next week. The next results will relate to

2012, when hardly any of those programmes for improvements have had

a chance to bite into the system, if you like. I would anticipate that

any realistic person would look to the next set of PISA results with

caution. The Welsh and have put a lock of

emphasis on climbing up the international league table. They

want to be in the top 20 countries by 2015, the next round of tests.

That was always going to be a huge challenge and some are now saying it

is a test to file but when I recently caught up with the head of

PISA in London, he agreed it was not in possible.

It is a significant challenge but at the same time, if you look at the

most rapidly improving education systems, that pace of progress is

rarely possible if you think about Poland or at the bottom of the

league, Brazil. It is one of the lowest performing countries. The

pace of change there is the one that could bring a place like Wales well

into the top 20. There is hope that the standing of

Wales in the international rankings could improve but to throw a further

convocation into this mix, there are now some who say this PISA game is

one we may not want to pay. This is just one set of data and

international comparisons. This is all they are and they were never

meant to define an education system. PISA say that is not what they are

for but the minister chose to use them to say we have a crisis in our

education system. The question that needs to be asked is do we want an

education system that is fit for purpose or fit for PISA?

Arwyn Jones reporting. Joining me now is education expert and advisor

to the Welsh Government, Professor David Reynolds.

Good evening. What do you expect next week? I haven't seen the

figures and identical them to be particularly good.

I wouldn't be surprised if we got the wooden spoon and were bottom of

the four UK home nations, as it were. I think it is possible we may

even do slightly worse. Further decline?

It is possible because a lot of the policies are only beginning to

impact now. So we are talking about a three year

gap but that was in it -- was not enough time?

Three years in a short period of time but you are trying to do in

three years what wasn't done in the preceding ten. If you look about the

world, governments did an awful lot wherever you look and we tended not

to. What we did was with the Twickenham, not teaching.

After devolution, you say that we took our eyes off the ball in

education? We looked at the wrong ball. We

changed the curriculum and things like the Welsh baccalaureate.

Absolutely fine. We did not realise and I think we were stupid, that we

did not actually get the teaching methods improving.

So the Welsh government was stupid in terms of dictation?

I said we, which includes everyone involved in education.

They run it! You can't do the curriculum without

doing the teaching and in most societies did was curriculum reform

but they empowered teachers. They gave teachers capacity to be better

professionals. We are doing that now but we didn't then.

We are talking about a period where Jane Davidson was education

Minister. She scrapped testing and so forth. She brought in the

foundation phase but was she wrong to stop testing?

My own view is yes, that harmed us. There is evidence done by

researchers from Bristol and my own view is that you need demand to

operate in a country, which is parents demanding that schools get

better, as well as supply, and what we didn't do was put performance

data into the public domain so the parents would know what is going on.

The best way of improving the school system is for parents to push to

improve it and for them to choose. We didn't put the data out to help

them do that. For parents in Wales Today who are

clearly worried about Little Johnny heading to school every day, read

there is something seriously wrong with the Welsh education system. We

read the bad news on an almost daily basis. What is the message? I'll be

getting back on track and by 2015 all will be well? Is that little

comfort to today's parents? In my business we expect things to

get better in education when things like attendance start to pick up and

children start going back to school and that is happening in Wales. I

sense there is change but after ten years of May be doing not the right

thing, it is getting an awful lot of things done in the three years which

is the problem. Will be PISA results in 2015 be

better? Will all have these things kicked in?

I think they will be better but I think the 2015 testing which is

under two years from now, that 2015 testing will be in science, where we

start with a big advantage because we actually are on the world average

performance for science. Our best chance ever is to get it right with

science for the testing in 2015 but, with respect, I think for 2015

to be good, there are things we have to do.

If you ask teachers, they say there is an awful lot of change going on

and it is never settled. It is never allowed to bed in. They say they

need politicians to back off. Would that work?

I think it is reasonable for politicians to say, look, we have

announced everything we can do and let back off and see if parents can

improve things. Let's actually see if the system starts moving. I think

in the next year, someone has to make the judgement about whether

things are improving fast enough. At the moment it is the right decision

that we let things bed in but if it hasn't worked a year from now, we

have to do more to get a good result in 2015.

Education in Wales used to be a batch of honour. You can't say that,

really, today, can you? Will those days return?

I think yes. If we are clever and we learn. I think in Wales we speak as

though we are always a failure in education but we saved a minority

language. We save Welsh through the education system so we did something

right. In the 1970s we ran a fine education system here. It is not

that we don't know how to educate children but somewhere something

went wrong. We can be discover that and I would be interested in seeing

the Welsh government find out why we have in successful with the Welsh

language and we are a success in science and maths and reading and we

should tell everybody more about what we need to do.

Thank you. The divide between urban and rural

Wales is wider than ever before with poverty a blight on rural

communities across the country. The Wales Report has seen figures that

show one organisation geared to help rural areas has paid out three times

more money in the first nine months of this year than in the same period

last year. David Williams has been back to his roots in North Wales to

discover what has been done to reverse the fortunes of a

countryside in decline. The melodious tones emanating from

this primary school in North Wales helped to dampen rather more

disturbing notes which now resonate in the beautiful countryside in

which these countries are growing up in. It doesn't take a scientist to

tell you that this school is going to close pretty school. -- pretty

soon. When you get into that downward spiral of that school

closing, there is no teachers and there is less implement so there is

less need for people. Poverty and hardship now threaten to

bite a whole new generation of young people. Back in the day, I used to

sit at this desk and I was expect to be a model pupil because the man

standing at the front, the, was my father. In return for personal

effort, he infused us with hope. Many of my fellow pupils were the

sons and daughters of those who farmed the land around the school.

Generations before them had done the same. They had struggled, certainly,

but there was no doubt that those who wished to continue on the farm

would be allowed to do so. That is no longer a certainty. The school

now has just 20 pupils, only half of them have parents with any

connection with farming and only one lives on a farm. The way of life is

in danger of disappearing. This man, aged 83, has farmed here all

his life. I remember him. He was an enduring site in the field and on

the hills around here. A constant in the landscape. His family have been

tenants here for over a century in what was a Welsh speaking heartland.

He had hoped that one of his two children would take over from him

but the farm's for income now make that unlikely. In Welsh, his anguish

of choice, he explained to me that his children's decision is a cause

of pain and anguish for him and his wife.

He is himself on the point of giving up farming. Many more like him are

on the edge of the financial abyss, forced to look for help. Their

plight is reflected in part of the dramatic rise of the numbers seeking

assistance from the Royal agricultural benevolent institution,

a charity. The scale of the problem becomes clear when you read this,

and internal briefing drawn up by the institution, and the figures

here have not been released publicly until now. What they show is a

worrying trend. In Wales, in the first nine months of this year, the

amount of grants paid out to farmers in need by the institution was three

times as many as in the same period last year. The figures translate

into cash hand-outs being given to almost 100 working farmers. Compared

with 29 last year. Those statistics are impersonal. What are the

consequences in human terms? How do they reflect themselves in the

stories and the problems which lie behind them? People do not like to

ask for money from charities. This man is the benevolent institution's

welfare officer for North Wales. He has seen first hand what one bad

winter and soaring feed and fuel prices can do to reverse a former's

fortunes. If somebody has lost maybe 200 lambs, they would be losing

money in sales. In terms of an ordinary person working in a factory

or an office, ?15,000 off your salary equates to ?300 a week, would

you are I be able to manage? That's how difficult it has been for

farmers. Some people have come to the end of the road and there have

been cases where people have taken their own lives because they have

given up, haven't there? I have come across people who have been suicidal

this year. Poverty in the countryside is not only to be found

on the farms. In this part of the world, it further scarred the

industrial landscape. This town has the unenviable title of being

Wales's low wage title -- low-wage capital. It was once one of the most

important slate producing towns in the world. It is not all doom and

gloom. A considerable amount of public money has helped the people

of this town help themselves. Roughly ?5 million has been spent

here over the last five years, but is it enough to persuade young

people that there is a future for them here in this strikingly

beautiful but sometimes economic league -- economic league RF part of

the countryside? They are coming in their hundreds,

mountain bikers from all over Britain careering down pads once

trodden by miners, a dangerous pastime, and one which is producing

once again vital revenue. The regeneration project has capitalised

on a national resource, in the hope of turning slate into a new source

of revenue for a town that has paid a heavy price for roofing the world.

We are developing schemes here, the community are developing schemes

here, not someone from outside, ought plonking some sort of holiday

park here. The profit is invested back into the community.

Regeneration project have to have a life aeons the first grant if they

are to be truly meaningful. Creating a dependency culture is of little

use in securing the long-term future of our town which believes it is on

the up after decades of decline. The local MP believes that part of the

answer is to re-establish a quango style rural body with direct links

and input into regen arising -- really energising the --

reenergising the economy. A quango, but a very good one, if I am honest.

They did a lot of good work, assisting people to diversify,

assisting small businesses to take on new staff and being able to

borrow within reason. I want something similar to be brought

back. We need to revisit that. While school's out, the jury is as well on

a whole new generation in the countryside. Pupils in schools like

this one deserves to be treated what -- given what we were given when we

were pupils here. Hope, and the tools to realise our dreams.

That special report from David Williams. Yesterday the Scottish

Government launched detailed plans for independence, outlining the

focus of the referendum campaign which will concentrate on Scotland's

future - on jobs, economic growth and security. The vote will take

place next year, on September the 18th, but what will the outcome mean

for devolution here in Wales? I'll be discussing that with my guests in

a moment. But first here's Scotland's First Minister Alex

Salmond setting out his stall. These things follow as night follows day,

Scotland have indicated their willingness in this document that we

will accept the financing of some of the massive obligations,

liabilities, that have been built up by Alistair Darling and no George

Osborne. That is predicated on the share of assets. One of these assets

is the Bank of England. If Scotland vote yes and wants to keep the

pound, Wales's first Minister would want to be consulted. If one part of

the currency union decides to leave, it is a matter for them of

course. But if an independent nation wants to join, that is a matter for

the people of Wales, Northern Ireland and England. I would want to

have a say in that. Good evening to my guests. First of all, we will get

onto the pound shortly, but let's paint a picture, next September.

Scotland says yes, what happens in Wales? If there is a yes vote, you

will have two years of negotiating between the UK government or the

government for the rest of the UK and Scotland. Between now and then,

there will be a lot of heat and not much liked being generated because

both sides will be naturally spinning their side of the argument.

If Scotland goes its own way, I think for Wales, we did not need to

be too nervous about this. After all, Ireland's left the United

Kingdom in 1922, that did not create great issues. One thing for us is a

concern, but Scotland will get much more weight and momentum to the

devolution process in the case of Scotland and Wales, because Wales

attended to trail behind Scotland. There is that concern that of

Scotland goes its own way, that may cease. On the other hand, the people

of Wales will be able to observe how successful or otherwise an

independent Scotland is over the next five to ten years. That may

impact the views of Welsh voters regarding further powers to Wales.

The crucial relationship will be Wales and England. We do not know

what it will be called. Will we be subsumed? It is a difficult position

Wales would be in because it is a matter of getting your voice heard,

including Scotland, the three Celtic parts of the UK have 10 million

people out of a total of 64 million. England has 54 million.

Overwhelmingly dominant already. Take Scotland out, you have the

Celtic part of the United Kingdom. Suddenly England becomes 92% of the

total. It is going to be very difficult. Particularly for Wales,

although Wales is bigger than Northern Ireland, but Northern

Ireland has a special status. Wales doesn't. Getting Wales's voice heard

is quick to be three times harder than it is now and it is already

very hard. The currency is a huge issue. Clearly the pound is the

issue up in Edinburgh at the moment. Should Wales have a saying whether

or not they can keep the pound? In theory, Wales should have a say. But

nobody is going to listen very much to Wales. No disrespect on this

issue, it is going to be very much London, Westminster Whitehall, Bank

of England discussion. Wales will not count in that at all. I do not

agree with that. The critical thing is whether Scotland would be allowed

to join the currency union, the sterling zone, and cut corporation

tax. That would be unprecedented. They would want to see the taxes

that people pay no -- move it to Edinburgh and you will pay lower

corporation tax. It would be quite proper for him to say hang on a

minute. I do not know what the relationship is, but the issue is

this. If our first Minister says we would object to Scotland staying in

the sterling zone and cutting corporation tax, if they agree to

keep corporation tax at the same level, OK, if we are allowed as well

to cut corporation tax in Wales so we have the same advantage, in other

words rewarding Scotland for breaking away from the United

Kingdom and penalising Wales. Scenario B, what happens here to

mark the SNP is finished, isn't it? I don't think so, I have spent a lot

of time in Scotland. Certainly I think it depends on the outcome,

quite how much the defeat would be for the SNP. Let's assume Scotland

loses the referendum, the SNP does, there will be a move for more

devolution to Scotland. Precisely how far is debatable. That is the

irony, a no vote could lead to more powers for Scotland and Wales. I

think it would lead to Alex Salmond's resignation. He will say,

look, he will think that Scots will want to keep him, the neutrals will

want to keep them as well as the SNP. You know him very well, this is

a massive gamble, isn't it? It is and he is a gambler, but he will at

the anti-by saying he will resign and I think he will resign if they

lose the vote. Nicola Sturgeon will take over which is OK. The key thing

is that in that guidebook, the White Paper they published yesterday,

which is intended to paint a picture, let's get our hands on the

revenue, cut corporation tax and increase public expenditure by

getting our hands on the oil revenue, if Scotland votes no, are

you going to say, he has painted a very positive picture, will the no

campaign paint an equally positive picture of Scotland stays in the

union by offering increased devolution? In a word, how will it

go? It will be much closer than the polls indicate. I think now will

win. But if yes wins, it will put Wales on a difficult position and

the constitution of the rump UK into a very unstable situation. I hope it

is a yes vote. I look forward to campaigning for a yes vote up there.

Thank you very much. That's it for this week's programme.

Huw Edwards will be back in two weeks' time with a special programme

with Health Minister Mark Drakeford. And of course you can get in touch

with any questions for the Health Minister, the issues discussed

tonight, or indeed anything else. Email us at: And we are on Twitter.

Thanks for watching. Diolch am wylio. Good night. Nos da.