What is Education? Lecture 1

The first guest lecturer we had for the module What is Education? was Ken Jones. Ken spoke about the local authority’s role in education and issues that effected them. He started by asking is anyone knew who the minster for education in Wales is and how is predecessor is, no one really answered him so he informed us that the minster is Leighton Andrew and predecessor is Jane Davidson. He then went onto speak about their previously being 8 local authorities but the following reorganisation in 1999 there are now 22 unitary authorities. The issue was is the size and capacity of local authorities and the response was move reorganisations into 4 consortia.

Then Ken Jones went to speak about PISA. The in 2006 the PISA (Programme for international students assessment) testing which is set by OECD (Organisation for economic co-operation and development) compared how 70 countries were doing in relation to reading, maths and science. Wales weren’t high in the ranking of the 70 countries, so Wales response was to up the SEF (School effective framework). SEF was Wales' key policy for education reform and its main aim was to improve better learning outcomes and wellbeing for children.