Education Policy and Practice- The Welsh Scene: Guest Speaker Ken Jones

Every week our Education policy and practice lectures and seminars will be taken by different guest speakers who are going to talk about different key areas of policies and initiatives. Our first guest lecturer was Professor Ken Jones, who spoke to us about education in Wales, to start we were told about the background of Wales, the geography and also about the welsh language used in schools. These were very interesting facts which showed and made us understand a lot about the welsh education. We were also given information about the PISA tests which were introduced in 2006, they are international tests that are done every four years across the country and are then compared with other international schools on their performance. It shows in the PISA test that in 2010 Wales results have declined and the focus in Wales will be to improve literacy and numeracy. Focusing on literacy and numeracy is a great idea as I think that literacy and numeracy is a great importance in a child's education. We were also told by professor Ken Jones about the School Effectiveness Programme (SEF) we was given a website to look at about SEF of professor Ken Jones there are six main areas towards SEF which are Curriculum and Teaching, Leadership, Working with others, Networks of professional practice, Intervention and support and Improvement and Accountability. we discussed that there is an importance in all of these areas to have an effective school.