Kathy Rastle

speaker

59 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 3 Jun

Kathy Rastle’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

More or Less · Debunking the claim that migrants will get half of new homes · 3 Jun 2026 podcast

Well, it seems to have come from a series of reports by the Welsh schools regulator.

These reports were around 15 years old, but they don't contain much actual data.

So in addition to being quite old, we don't know what was measured.

We don't know how the children were sampled.

We don't know who they were compared against.

So I wouldn't put too much faith in that particular claim.

I think that they were talking at that stage around children entering secondary school.

But again, they don't say much about how they derived that claim.

Well, we don't usually say functional illiteracy.

So reading skills are on a continuum.

Some children, particularly in low-income countries, most children don't learn to read at all.

So they would be illiterate.

But then beyond that, in this country, we teach children to read.

And they have a range of proficiency levels.

Some of them can barely read at all.

Some of them are quite good at reading.

And we talk about functional literacy as the literacy skills that you need to get on in life.

So to participate in society, to enjoy gainful employment, tasks like reading your payslip, reading the instructions on a medicine bottle, perhaps applying for a job online.

So that would be functional literacy.

So if a child doesn't have functional literacy, then they'd be unable to do those tasks.

Showing 1–20 of 59 · page 1 of 3