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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And we can compare that to the OECD average of 26% and the England average of 20%.
So in fact, the PISA data suggests a picture that's even worse than the initial claim came with.
Exactly.
So that particular claim was very old.
It's not based on great data, but we do have very strong data that's recent that suggests that Wales is in a really dark place as far as children's reading is concerned.
We do know why.
A report by the IFS, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, looked into what the reasons might be.
They concluded that it's not due to something like poverty.
So, for example, disadvantaged children in England scored around 30 points higher than in Wales.
It's also not due to something like education spending.
And they determined that it's most likely due to certain policies and approaches.
And they mentioned, for example, the less use of data.
And what I would add is that Wales hasn't yet adopted evidence-based reading instruction in contrast to England, which adopted it almost 20 years ago.
Exactly.
So we know from 35 years of cognitive psychology about how children learn to read and how they should best be taught.
And one of the first stages of learning to read is learning to understand how the alphabet works, how the alphabet represents language.
And the way that we do that is through explicit phonics instruction.
Now, that was brought in in England around 20 years ago, and there's been a whole series of policies that have made that really work.
So it's just a shame that that hasn't occurred yet in Wales.
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