YOU are lucky to be reading Badger, dear readers.
Badger doesn’t mean that the quality of his prose is so wonderful that you are fortunate to have access to it. Neither does Badger mean that either you or he are lucky to have lived long enough to enjoy this column at this time.
Badger’s point is more fundamental.
Unlike one-fifth of the children leaving Wales’s primary schools, you are able to read. Because you’re able to read, Badger is writing a much longer piece than usual this week.
20% of all of the children educated in Welsh primary schools go forward to secondary education functionally illiterate.
Let’s chew on that, readers.
If that statistic doesn’t cause you outrage, nothing will.
Instead of reading, let’s do some arithmetic.
According to Welsh Government statistics, 250,000 full-time-equivalent pupils attended Welsh primary schools in 2023. You can read the data for yourself HERE.
If you suppose that student numbers are evenly divided between Years One and Six, that’s around 41,500 in each school year of primary education.
So, at the end of Year Six in 2023, over 8,000 students left primary education for secondary school unable to read. The worst thing is that figure MUST represent an improvement in the number of pupils unable to read in Years One to Five. After all, you’d hope that five years of education in Welsh schools would improve children’s literacy.
The problem is not new. In 2012, the schools’ watchdog Estyn said that a fifth of children starting secondary school were “functionally illiterate”.
That’s no measurable improvement in over a decade.
There’s a reason for that.
The Welsh Government encourages schools to use a method called cueing. Children are told to use pictures and context to tackle unfamiliar words.
It is not true that “if you keep reading, it will click eventually.” Learning to read does not come naturally, and the idea that it does was comprehensively rubbished over fifty years ago.
Following a parliamentary inquiry in 2005, it was abolished, with the UK government mandating the teaching of systematic synthetic phonics instead. It has also been abandoned in the rest of the English-speaking world. But not in Wales. Wales is different. There is, as ever, “a Welsh Way” of doing things. And this one sucks.
It’s hard to deny that the Welsh Government sometimes does things differently than the rest of the UK. Sometimes, it does things differently and does them well. Sometimes, and in a distressingly familiar pattern in public services, it does them not only worse but far worse.
The Welsh Government mandates a blended strategy for teaching children to read. It uses phonics and cueing. However, cueing is so damaging that it undermines any progress made through phonics. Moreover, the confusion caused by using different teaching methods undermines the progress of the worst readers.
You couldn’t make it up, readers.
The Welsh Government has ignored decades of research and hundreds of academic articles and studies and deliberately chosen to teach children badly using a method it knows or should know, which damages children’s ability to read.
It’s not been forced to do that, readers. A Labour government in Westminster abandoned the cockamamie method used in Welsh schools. However, Labour in Wales actively chose an inferior teaching system.
The Welsh Government’s actions verge on the criminal.
In the Senedd on Tuesday (Oct 2), the leader of the Welsh Conservatives, Andrew RT Davies, asked Eluned Morgan about the scandal of illiteracy in Wales’s eleven-year-olds.
Badger has been very unkind about Mr Davies’s abilities as a politician. Too often, the Welsh Conservative leader is less of a leader and more of a novelty act in an old end-of-the-pier show.
This week, however, RT cut the bluster and blather.
He asked Eluned Morgan: “What is your Government doing to improve those stats and give children the best possible start to enjoy and appreciate the joy of reading?”
Twenty-five years into devolved responsibility for educating Wales’s children, you’d imagine the Welsh Government would have a clue what to do.
Instead, as always, it has a plan to make a statement about a plan.
Baroness Morgan replied: ” I am very concerned that we need to improve the quality and standards of reading in our country. I know this is absolutely a priority for the Cabinet Secretary for Education. She’ll be making a statement on how she thinks things should improve in the next couple of months.
“One of the issues, of course, is about how you teach reading, and there has been a discussion about what the best way to do that is.
“I think it’s important that we follow the evidence, and if we follow the evidence, my understanding is that there should be more concentration on phonics.
“My understanding is that that’s the guidance that the education Minister may be giving out soon, just to make sure that there’s firmer guidance in terms of the methodology for teaching in our schools.”
Andrew RT Davies pressed the point.
“We in Wales had the worst performance when it came to reading in the Programme for International Student Assessment international rankings. You said we have to wait for a statement from the education minister again. The evidence is there. Why not just get on and do it so another generation isn’t lost in our education system?”
The First Minister’s answer dug a hole for her predecessors so deep that twenty-four years of Labour education ministers are presently emerging from a shaft somewhere near Adelaide.
“We know that we need to follow the evidence, and the evidence suggests that we should be teaching in a specific manner, and that’s the guidance that I’m sure the Secretary will be giving out.”
A cruel person would wonder aloud just how long the Welsh Government knew its approach was bollocks, but Badger is kind. So he won’t.
Andrew RT Davies’s follow-up was more sober and considered than Badger’s first instincts.
“The Welsh Government has not instigated the international testing regime so that we can understand the performance of learners and our education system is in Wales.
“We will have to wait another couple of weeks. So, for another couple of weeks, children will continue being taught under a failed system. We need to have that testing regime so that we can see exactly the performance that is going on in our schools.
“Will you commit, like other parts of the United Kingdom, to bringing forward that testing regime so that we can drive up standards of reading here in Wales and give every learner the opportunity that we all want to see?”
In a blathering answer, Eluned Morgan avoided saying “no”. But “no” is what she meant.
Instead, in a wildly off-topic answer to a question about Port Talbot and the need for retraining its workforce, the First Minister bizarrely rambled: “We must get the fundamentals right in terms of growing the economy. I do think that education is a central piece of that.
“We’ve got to focus on the fundamentals. Reading is a part of that fundamental.
“I can assure you that the education Secretary is absolutely focused on this issue and very concerned about the situation. And what I will tell you is that, obviously, the UK Labour Government committed to reduce and eliminate the VAT situation in relation to private schools.
“That would release some funding that will be available, then, to schools to support the 93 per cent of people who attend state schools – in the United Kingdom.”
“Bizarre” doesn’t come close to explaining that answer.
Firstly, it didn’t answer Rhun ap Iorwerth’s question or even approach answering it.
Secondly, the First Minister can’t be seriously suggesting that VAT on public school fees (not a bad idea) would somehow raise enough money to improve the teaching of literacy in Welsh schools. Could she?
In a universe of infinite possibilities, that could be what Eluned Morgan said. Badger hunted for an alternative way of interpreting the First Minister’s words. If she thinks whatever VAT on public school fees will raise will undo twenty-five years of damaging generations of young children’s educations and futures, she’s bonkers.
If Badger sounds angry, it’s because he is.
He’s bloody furious.
Badger cannot imagine a life without the pleasure of reading. He cannot remember a time he didn’t or couldn’t read. Badger does, however, remember how he was taught to read. And it wasn’t by looking at bloody pictures and trying to guess the words so that “he would get it eventually”.
The joy of reading is the joy of entering endless new worlds and endless possibilities. Denying a child those experiences is monstrously cruel. Failing to ensure that children get the best possible education based on hard evidence is unforgivable.
The Welsh Government has been criminally reckless with the futures of those least able to intervene and call attention to the harm being done to them.
The basic skills a child needs are literacy and numeracy. You don’t absorb reading by staring at a page, looking at pictures and trying to piece together clues as to what the symbols underneath mean. When you learn to read, you learn the rules of reading using the sounds the letters make.
Now, readers, please put yourself in a four-year-old child’s shoes. There’s a picture with a set of symbols underneath it that you can’t interpret. Now, learn to read. You’ll get it in the end, honest.
F*ck right off.
This isn’t about teachers failing pupils and parents. It’s about Welsh ministers and civil servants failing teachers, pupils and parents and damaging tens of thousands of lives on purpose for decades.
Badger has seldom, if ever, been so volcanically furious at any government – and he remembers when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister.
The Welsh Government’s attitude may be that it will all come out or right in the end. That’s no comfort for any of the children and their children who Welsh ministers have failed for decades.
Two months for the Minister to act?
Two weeks?
Two days?
Two hours?
Two minutes is too bloody long.
If Welsh Government ministers aren’t shameless, they should be ashamed.
