Ellie Craven: The quiet collapse of Welsh education

Ellie Craven, is a Senior Researcher at the think thank, Onward

For more than a quarter of a century, the Welsh Labour government has presided over the slow betrayal of its own children. Onward’s new paper, Devolved to Fail, lays bare just how deep the rot runs.

Standards in Welsh schools are not merely stagnating; they are slipping further and further behind. If nothing changes by 2040, Wales will not be competing with England or Scotland – but with Romania, a country whose economy is smaller than our annual welfare bill.

It is easy to forget that education in Wales is devolved. One could be forgiven for assuming otherwise, given how little attention is paid to its performance. The OECD’s PISA scores, the global benchmark for 15-year-olds in reading, science and maths, expose the scale of the decline. In reading and science, pupils in Wales score about 6 per cent lower than their peers in England – the equivalent of losing an entire year of schooling.

And what does that mean in human terms?

It means the average child in a Welsh classroom is performing at the same level as the poorest children in England. That is not levelling up. It is selling out a generation.

For a government so quick to highlight its commitment to social justice when the nation’s press are in the room, these results are an indictment of the misplaced priorities and political obstinacy of Welsh Labour. When the Conservatives took office in Westminster, they swept away the discredited “cueing method” for teaching reading and replaced it with phonics. Wales not only resisted, it doubled down – scrapping league tables entirely. The outcome was as predictable as it was disastrous: children guessing at words instead of reading them, schools ducking accountability, and a generation left trailing hopelessly behind.

The pandemic may have worsened the problem, but it did not create it. Wales was already adrift before Covid struck. Now education experts estimate that the pandemic has erased all the progress made since 2012. That is a decade wiped away – and even that modest improvement was far behind the rest of the UK.

This year’s GCSE and A-Level results underline the point: pass rates have inched up by just 0.7 and 0.3 percentage points respectively, while top A-A grades actually fell. That is not progress – it is drift. Wales is the only UK nation going backwards at the top end of attainment.

Attendance is another looming catastrophe. One in five pupils in Wales now misses at least a tenth of their lessons. Overall absence stands at 22 per cent – three times higher than in England. Estyn, the Welsh schools inspectorate, warns that at the current rate, attendance will not return to pre-pandemic levels until the late 2030s. That would condemn an entire cohort to underperformance through no fault of their own.

The remedy is not another glossy mission statement or a string of well-meaning platitudes. Wales must abandon its woolly “skills-based” curriculum and replace it with one grounded in knowledge. “Ambitious, capable learners ready to learn throughout their lives” is a pleasing phrase for a government press release, but it is no substitute for literacy and numeracy.

The evidence is clear.

The cueing method should be consigned to the dustbin and phonics mandated, as England did after the Rose Review. League tables should be restored so parents know how schools are performing and failing ones cannot hide. Schools that persistently underperform should face proper intervention, not indulgent handwringing. And Estyn’s recommendations on attendance should be acted upon now, not filed away for another decade.

Yet instead of urgency, the Welsh Government responded to our report with complacency – boasting that results “show improvements” and insisting the system is “moving in the right direction.” Our reply was simple: less than a 1 per cent rise is no cause for celebration, and it is certainly no strategy for change. Wales does not need self-congratulation. It needs reform.

There is no shame in learning from what works, whether across the border or at home. The Grŵp Llandrillo Menai college network in North Wales has shown what success looks like: outperforming national averages and sending students to Oxford and medical school. That example should not be the exception.

Wales does not need another vision. It needs urgency. It needs leadership. And above all, it needs a government willing to face facts, not hide behind spin.

Another wasted decade would not just be a failure. It would be unforgivable.