Kathy Rastle

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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.

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

Exactly.

So if I am a farmer in rural India, my need for reading skills is going to be much different than if I'm a school leaver in England.

Well, there's a very good assessment called the PISA, and it stands for Program for International Student Assessment.

Now, this is an assessment on reading comprehension, amongst other things, that's conducted when children are 15 years old.

It's conducted about every three years, and around 80 nations participate.

And the thing about PISA is that it has very high technical standards.

strong sampling protocols, rigorous translation processes.

And what that means is that we can compare scores from year to year over time, and we can also compare scores across nations.

What we know about Wales is that they did very poorly indeed in the 2022 exercise.

So their average performance in reading was significantly below the OECD average.

and it was well below the England average, reflecting several months of schooling.

And in fact, Wales' reading scores are now lower than almost any time in the PISA cycle across the last 20 years.

Well, in addition to the average performance, you can also look at the distribution of the data.

And that's what's very concerning.

So in PISA, we have six proficiency levels.

And these proficiency levels are a way of mapping the score onto descriptions of reading ability that corresponds to different levels of understanding of a text.

And in PISA, we think of level two as the baseline to get on in society.

So that would be the functional literacy standard.

Now, critically, in Wales in 2022, 29% of children fell below that level two standard.

So 29% of 15-year-olds have a reading ability that is not sufficient to get on in society.

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