PISA Table, very poor rankings.

[cee-dee]

So the UK has come out badly in the World rankings and Wales is bottom of the pile in the UK?

Why do YOU think that is?

Why do I think that is? Here goes:-

There's many contributory factors and one thing that seems to stand out is that for some reason the education system seems to think that everyone will "achieve" if they're all treated the same. They won't! All that will happen is that in the end, the brightest will get dragged down to the same level as "poor achievers".

Another thing is that current teaching seems not to care about bad spelling and poor grammar. We see the results of that every day in news reports whether online or on paper.

The curriculum is far too wide, before wasting valuable learning time on pet subjects, the basic reading, writing and mathematics should be learned well at primary school.

As to the results from Wales, what can you expect? They're ramming the Welsh language down the throats of little kids and for what? Keeping the culture and history is one thing, insisting that Welsh takes precedence over everything else is wrong. My friends 5 year old grandchild was told by her teacher not to listen to what anyone out of school tried to teach her, she should only listen to her teachers!

I saw how some South Korean children were learning and they'd gone from one extreme to another, teenagers spending 13 hours a day at school is far too much but..... those interviewed spoke English in a way that would put many in this country to shame and one boy spoke so well, he'd make a better newsreader than many at the BBC. I saw a Scottish man being interviewed in Glasgow and couldn't understand most of what he was saying which leads back to cramming Welsh.

The South Korean children are leaning ENGLISH, the reason being English is now the language of the World. Go more or less anywhere and there's someone who understands English? Where can you go (apart from Wales) where you might find a Welsh speaker? The Southern tip of South America?

I'm not attacking the Welsh language or the culture, I'm criticising the narrow minded attitude, the results of which is evident from the poor standings in the PISA table?

[lost.parrot]

Not falling educational standards, lol, I wonder where they are supposed to have ‘fallen’ too looking at recent examples here.

There was the ‘excellent' example recently of the not guilty verdict taken as meaning any accuser/s etc must be. Before that the potato virus brought back from the dead…a revelation if true all on its own. Of course it was merely an investigation into why a particular strain of a pathogen, thought to have been responsible for the Irish potato famine , was thought to have become extinct.. the strain that is, not the actual generic pathogen. This seemed to bewilder the poster, as well as convince him scientists just had far too little common sense. Indeed if they had, they would spend more time on chat-boards, moaning about any old rubbish. Of course it would have been possible for the poster to have found out a little more, but then that would have eaten into valuable moaning time